Comparative Legal Research: An Interdisciplinary Approach
Session One: Sherally K Munshi
Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center
On a Decolonial Comparative Law
Date: Match 31st at 12:00 PM (E.T.)
This essay seeks to reanimate comparative legal scholarship by reorienting it towards decolonizing critique. In his critical assessment of the state of the field, Pierre Legrand suggests that comparative law has become mired in a solipsistic and outmoded style of positivism. Drawing upon theoretical insights from critical theory, Legrand argues that comparative law might render itself more generative and more relevant by engaging in a more contextualized analysis of law and encouraging active interpretation beyond descriptive reporting. This essay extends those arguments to suggest that an emancipated, incorporative, and interdisciplinary comparative law might play an important role in decolonizing legal scholarship more broadly. Founded in a commitment to constrain an ethnocentric impulse in legal discourse, comparative law might be expanded to challenge the varieties of Eurocentrism that continue to define legal scholarship and study, while providing hospitable ground for critical and interdisciplinary projects aimed at exploring the colonial roots of both the contemporary nation-state system and globalized racial formations.
Sherally Munshi earned her JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD in Literature from Columbia University. Before coming to Georgetown, she was a Perkins / LAPA Fellow at Princeton University. Her areas of scholarly interests include property law, immigration law, and critical legal theory. Her writing has appeared in the Yale Journal of Law &Humanities, the American Journal of Comparative Law, and Harper’s. Prior to teaching, she worked as a legal associate at Willkie Farr &Gallagher, LLP, in New York.
Session Two: Sara Ross
Assistant Professor, Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Law and Culture in the City: Sociolegal Methodologies, Institutional Ethnography, Legal Anthropology, and Comparativism
Date: April 7 at 12:00 PM (E.T.)
The textures of law in society are palpable within the spaces of our cities. This talk will narrow in on approaches that can be taken to explore the diverse urban sites of law and the engagement that people have with law as the navigate their everyday lives in urban space. Where inequalities and marginalization take many shapes, interdisciplinary approaches and sociolegal methodologies can be effectively applied to distill the mechanics of inequality, which then yields a rich array of comparative data. This talk will also narrow in on the intersection of property, law, and culture in cities, and will explore interdisciplinary methodologies and approaches that can be applied in their comparative investigation—namely that of institutional ethnography and legal anthropology. This will draw on my past fieldwork, projects, and publications to illustrate the processes and utility of these interdisciplinary approaches broadly and within the context of comparative law.
Dr. Sara Ross (BA (U Alberta), BA Hons (McGill), LL.B (McGill), B.C.L (McGill), LL.M. (Ottawa), Ph.D (Osgoode)) is an Assistant Professor at Dalhousie University’s Schulich School of Law where she teaches property law, private international law, and critical perspectives on law. She has held three prestigious postdoctoral fellowships (Banting, SSHRC, and Killam), in addition to previously teaching at other law schools such as both the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia (Transnational Law and Cultural Law) and the Osgoode Hall Law School. Dr. Ross completed her articles as a law clerk to the Honourable Justice Luc Martineau at the Federal Court and became a lawyer-member of the bar (Ontario) in 2013.
Dr. Ross is an executive board member of the Canadian Law and Society Association (Vice-President (Conferences)), Canadian Association of Law Teachers (Treasurer), and the co-Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Canadian Legal Education Annual Review. In 2021, she was named one of the "Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers" in Canada by Canadian Lawyer magazine, and was a recipient of the "Rising Stars: Leading Lawyers Under 40" award for Lexpert magazine's top Canadian lawyers under 40.
Her critical, comparative, and legal anthropology research has led to two dozen scholarly articles, book chapters, and books. She is also an active speaker on the international stage, presenting her work in multiple countries, and a human rights special national rapporteur. Her current research focuses on both law and the city as well as law and culture, using an urban legal anthropology methodology and engaging with knowledge mobilization in both the academic and local community. Her most recent book, Law and Intangible Cultural Heritage in the City, was published by Routledge in 2019—a Toronto music journalist called it a “must-read” and a six-page review in the Osgoode Hall Law Journal calling it “compelling … memorable for her implicit preservation of the sites’ intangible cultural heritages by way of ink on paper.”
Session Three: Yun-chien Chang
Jack G. Clarke Professor in East Asian Law, Cornell Law School
Machine-Learning Comparative Law
Date: May 12 at 11:00 PM (E.T.)
Professor Chang will give a synthetic review of the comparative law methodologies he used in his previous works, particularly focusing on his forthcoming book: Property Law - Comparative, Empirical, and Economic Analysis. The first book of its kind, Property Law: Comparative, Empirical, and Economic Analyses, uses a unique hand-coded data set on nearly 300 dimensions on the substance of property law in 156 jurisdictions to describe the convergence and divergence of key property doctrines around the world. This book quantitatively analyzes property institutions and uses machine learning methods to categorize jurisdictions into ten legal families, challenging the existing paradigms in economics and law. Using other cross-country data, the author empirically tests theories about property law and comparative law. Using economic efficiency as both a positive and a normative criterion, each chapter evaluates which jurisdictions have the most efficient property doctrines, concluding that the common law is not more efficient than the civil law. Unlike prior studies on empirical comparative law, this book provides detailed citations to laws in each jurisdiction. Data and documentation are publicly available on the author's website.
Yun-chien Chang is the Jack G. Clarke Professor in East Asian Law and director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture. He previously served as a Research Professor at Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica, Taiwan and as the Director of its Empirical Legal Studies Center.
Professor Chang’s current academic interests focus on economic, empirical and comparative analysis of private law (particularly property law), as well as empirical studies of the judicial system. Prof. Chang has authored and co-authored more than 100 journal articles and book chapters. His English articles have appeared in leading journals around the world, such as Journal of Legal Studies; Journal of Legal Analysis; Journal of Law and Economics; American Law and Economics Review; Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization; Journal of Empirical Legal Studies; International Review of Law and Economics; European Journal of Law and Economics; I?Con; the University of Chicago Law Review; Notre Dame Law Review; Iowa Law Review and the Supreme Court Economic Review, among others.
His monograph Private Property and Takings Compensation: Theoretical Framework and Empirical Analysis (Edward Elgar, 2013) was a winner of the Scholarly Monograph Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences. His second monograph Property Law: Comparative, Empirical, and Economic Analyses is expected in 2022. Prof. Chang (co-)edited Empirical Legal Analysis: Assessing the Performance of Legal Institutions (Routledge, 2014), Law and Economics of Possession (Cambridge UP, 2015), Private Law in China and Taiwan: Economic and Legal Analyses (Cambridge UP, 2016), and Selection and Decision in Judicial Process Around the World: Empirical Inquires (Cambridge UP, 2020). Prof. Chang is also a co-author of Property and Trust Law in Taiwan (Wolters Kluwer, 2017; 2nd edition, 2022).
He authored several books in Chinese published in China and Taiwan, Economic Analysis of Law: A Methodological Primer (Beijing UP, 2022 forthcoming), Compensation for Physical and Regulatory Takings of Land: Theory and Practice (Angle, 2013; 2nd edition, 2020), Economic Analysis of Property Law (Standard Chinese: Angle, 2015; 2nd edition, 2021; simplified Chinese: Beijing UP, 2019), Empirical Legal Studies: Principles, Methods, and Applications (New Sharing, 2019; 2nd edition, 2022), and Interpreting Private Law: A Social Scientific Approach (New Sharing, 2020), and also (co-)edited The Empirical Legal Studies Reader I: Domestic Perspectives (The Law Press, 2020), The Empirical Legal Studies Reader II (The Law Press, 2022 forthcoming) and Empirical Studies of the Judicial Systems 2011 (Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica; 2013).
Professor Chang has served as a visiting professor at New York University, the University of Chicago, St. Gallen University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Haifa University, and Rotterdam Institute of Law and Economics. He has also conducted research at Free University of Berlin, University of Paris II, and University of Tokyo. He is currently Co-Editor of International Review of Law and Economics and an Associate Reporter on American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law Fourth, Property.
Professor Chang received his J.S.D. and LL.M. degree from New York University School of Law, where he was also a Lederman/Milbank Law and Economics Fellow and a Research Associate at the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, NYU. Before going to NYU, Prof. Chang had earned LL.B. and LL.M. degrees at National Taiwan University and passed the Taiwan bar. Prof. Chang has had working experience with prestigious law firms in Taiwan and has served as a legal assistant for the International Trade Commission.
