7 Nature and Position of Comparative Law in the Era of Globalization

Globalization has transformed the discipline from an academic art to legal practice's daily instrument: the transnational transactions (the harmonized regimes — CISG, UNIDROIT, INCOTERMS); the global courts' and tribunals' cross-fertilization (the "judicial dialogue" — constitutional courts citing each other; the ICJ/WTO/human-rights systems); the migration and refugees' mixed-system collisions; the legal-transplant industry of the transition era (post-Soviet, post-1990; China's WTO accession-era drafting; Nepal's own code-modernizations); the counter- currents (legal nationalism, the sovereignty revival — comparison politicized); and the discipline's new frontiers — comparative constitutional law's golden age, global legal indicators' rise (and their critique — the World Bank's Doing Business rankings era), the comparative study of legal cultures (non-state law, indigenous law, the guthi's own comparative claim). The position statement to quote in answers: globalization made comparison inescapable — the question is no longer whether to compare, but how well.