Although a great deal has changed in the years since the 1900 Paris Congress, a significant number of issues have remained constant for students of comparative law. When our predecessors convened at the turn of the last century, they were very much in the throes of a kind of scientism that coloured what they foresaw for their subject of study and, indeed, for the future of law itself. Their evolutionary orientation, their assumption that legal systems would become more universally alike, their continuing belief in the science of law as both a method for unbiased analysis and the discovery of the classifiable nature of all legal systems may seem both naive and self-deceptive from our current stance. But it says much about the difficulties that will have to be faced by future contributors that a good deal of comparative law still remains bound to the programmes and assumptions of that earlier era. By beginning with some of the laments – and some of the grounds for lamentation – my intention is not to be gratuitously insulting. Rather, I think it important to underscore that, as heirs to certain issues and approaches, comparatists have not entirely shaken free from some of their less defensible earlier positions.

There are, for example, the continuing complaints about the state of the art – ‘scholars crocheting with rules’ – and the articulation of remarkably imprecise and old-fashioned legal taxonomies, ranging from indefensible categories like ‘traditional’ law, unexamined ones like ‘religious’ law and simply resigned ones like my own favourite, ‘other’ conceptions of law.