Direito Comparado Negativo: o empreendimento sanitização
| Autor | Pierre Legrand |
| Cargo | Professor of Law, École de Droit de la Sorbonne (Paris, France) |
| Páginas | 1-64 |
Licenciado sob uma Licença Creative Commons
Licensed under Creative Commons
Rev. Investig. Const., Curitiba, vol. 10, n. 1, e231, jan./abr. 2023.
Revista de Investigações Constitucionais
ISSN 2359-5639
DOI: 10.5380/rinc.v10i1.88557
1
Negative Comparative Law:
The Sanitization Enterprise
Direito Comparado Negativo:
o empreendimento sanitização
PIERRE LEGRAND I,*
I École de Droit de la Sorbonne (Paris, France)
pierre_legrand@orange.fr
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3945-183X
Recibido/Received: 20.09.2022 / 20 September 2022
Aprovado/Approved: 13.12.2022 / 13 December 2022
Como citar esse artigo/How to cite this article: LEGRAND, Pierre. Negative Comparative Law: The Sanitization Enterprise. Revis-
ta de Investigações Constitucionais/Journal of Constitutional Research, Curitiba, vol. 10, n. 1, e231, Jan./Apr. 2023. DOI:
10.5380/rinc.v10i1
* Professor of Law, École de Droit de la Sorbonne (Paris, France). Visiting Professor, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law (Chica-
go). Visiting Professor, Escola de Direito, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (Curitiba). I research and teach comparative
law. I mostly work from primary texts, and I often quote in the source language – although I proceed casuistically rather than
systematically. Unless I indicate otherwise, emphases belong to the primary texts, and translations are mine.
Abstract
This article challenges four basic and intertwining as-
sumptions informing orthodox comparative law: that a
comparatist can exactly represent foreign law; that he
can write about foreign law objectively; that he can state
the truth regarding foreign law; and that he enjoys the
subjective agency to overcome the obstacles on the way
to the achievement of these goals. Comparatists-at-law
being oblivious to their structural cognitive weakness,
which makes the pursuit of these realizations irredeem-
ably preposterous, a strong contrarian programme is
necessary so as to bring comparative law to its epistemo-
logical senses and, in the process, to heighten the schol-
arly integrity and reliability of comparative interventions.
This article succinctly formulates such an oppositional
stance.
Keywords: comparative law; foreign law; critical theory;
epistemology; interpretation.
Resumo
Este artigo desaa quatro pressupostos básicos e entrela-
çados que informam o Direito Comparado ortodoxo: que
um comparatista pode representar exatamente o Direito
estrangeiro; que ele pode escrever sobre Direito estrangei-
ro objetivamente; que ele pode declarar a verdade sobre o
Direito estrangeiro; e que ele desfruta do arbítrio subjetivo
para superar os obstáculos no caminho para a realiza-
ção desses objetivos. Sendo os comparatistas do Direito
alheios à sua fraqueza cognitiva estrutural, que torna a
busca dessas realizações irremediavelmente absurda, um
forte programa contrário é necessário para trazer o Direito
Comparado a seus sentidos epistemológicos e, no processo,
aumentar a integridade acadêmica e conabilidade de in-
tervenções comparativas. Este artigo formula sucintamente
tal postura de oposição.
Palavras-chave: Direito Comparado; Direito estrangeiro;
teoria crítica; epistemologia; interpretação.
PIERRE LEGRAND
Rev. Investig. Const., Curitiba, vol. 10, n. 1, e231, jan./abr. 2023.
2
“To suer less he had wagered on foreignness”.
–Beckett1
In this article, valorously keeping to the thither side of 30,000 words inclusive of
notes and bibliography, I oer a challenge to four basic and intertwining assumptions
informing orthodox comparative law, the inuential brand of comparatism that gives
itself the task of Ordnung as task. The endarkening postulates to which I react negative-
ly are as follows: that a comparatist can exactly represent foreign law; that he can write
about foreign law objectively; that he can state the truth regarding foreign law; and
that he enjoys the subjective agency to overcome the obstacles on the way to the
achievement of these goals, all ultimately destined to assuage an abiding craving for
certitude (and a correlative loathing for interpretive play). Comparatists-at-law being
oblivious to their structural cognitive weakness, which makes the pursuit of these re
alizations irredeemably preposterous, a strong contrarian programme is necessary so
as to bring comparative law to its epistemological senses and, in the process, to height-
en the scholarly integrity and reliability of comparative interventions. This article suc-
cinctly formulates such an oppositional stance.
PREMISSES
Foreign law is what always-already presents itself for interpretation, what oers
itself to understanding.2 Foreign law is something that is there before me, that I encoun-
ter. It is an entity that concerns me as comparatist, because I defend the normative
relevance of foreign law locally in the fabrication of statutory determinations, judicial
opinions, or academic reections. Foreign law is that out of which and on the basis
of which I experience my comparative life-in-the-law. I am therefore interested in the
engaging, accessing, and interpreting of foreign law; I am preoccupied with how it is
1 BECKETT, S. Impromptu d’Ohio. S. Beckett (transl.). In: Catastrophe et autres dramaticules. Paris: Edi-
tions de Minuit, 1986 [1982]. p. 61 [“Pour moins sourir il avait misé sur l’étrangeté”]. In May 1980, literary
critic Samuel Gontarski, who had enjoyed a working relationship with Beckett for seven years and would be
organizing a conference within months at Ohio State University to celebrate the playwright’s seventy-fth
anniversary, instigated the writing of a new play expressly for the occasion. Initially styled the “Ohio project”,
Ohio Impromptu, rst staged in Columbus, Ohio, on 9 May 1981, is a rare example of Beckett agreeing to write
on request and the only work in Beckett’s oeuvre with a geographical reference. In the event, Beckett wrestled
for nine months before producing a play lasting ten minutes or so. In 1981, he translated the text into French
as Impromptu d’Ohio. For Beckett as self-translator, the French version consists, in eect, of a rewriting – not
in the least a surprising fact when one reminds oneself that “[w]hat one ‘translates’ is the untranslatability of
language, the untranslatability of idiom”: Spivak, G. C. The Politics of the Production of Knowledge. In CULLER,
J.; LAMB, K. (eds.). Just Being Dicult? Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003. p. 192. Spoken in the context
of an interview with S. J. Murray, the transcribed words are Spivak’s.
2 Cf. KAFKA, F. Die Zürauer Aphorismen. R. Calasso (ed.). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006 [1931†]. § 109. p. 117:
“The world will oer itself to you for unmasking” [“Anbieten wird sich Dir die Welt zur Entlarvung”].
Rev. Investig. Const., Curitiba, vol. 10, n. 1, e231, jan./abr. 2023.
Negative Comparative Law: The Sanitization Enterprise
3
brought into play. In this article, I maintain that from the standpoint of the comparatist,
freedom from standpoint is a delusion. In eect, any allegation along the lines of exact
representativeness of foreign law being achievable, any contention about an objective
or true statement on foreign law being feasible, any submission to the eect that such
integrally duplicative enunciations are within the epistemic grasp of the subjectively
earnest and rigorous comparatist-at-law, is “nothing other that an explicit appropria-
tion of [a] point of view” (“nicht anderes als ausdrückliche Aneignung des Blickstandes”).3
Since no perception exists out-of-culture, the comparatist’s outlook can only be thor-
oughly cultural and therefore necessarily perspectival or slanted. Moreover, ex com-
paratione hypothesi, the comparatist’s stance must pertain to a culture other than that
within which foreign law dwells and, there being more than one culture in co-presence,
must dier from foreign law’s approach.4 Narration of foreign law is not foreign law. Nar-
ration of foreign law cannot be foreign law. And narration of foreign law ought not to want
to be foreign law. (“Ceci n’est pas le droit étranger”, as Magritte might have framed the
matter considering the comparatist’s text.)
To reject the idea that the narration of foreign law could exist as an invariant
vis-à-vis foreign law even as it is other than it and subsequent to it, to foreground this
necessary distinction, is not to contend, however, that foreign law would be completely
absented from the narration. Rather, foreign law persistently haunts the narration, the
narration being of it. Yet, the inevitable dissonance that I address entails crucial episte-
mic consequences, the principal implication arguably being that description of foreign
law is impossible. Because narration constructs and enacts its own interpretation of for-
eign law, since it performs and institutes its own understanding, it can only ever approx-
imate description. Narration must fail to restitute foreign law. It follows that exactness,
apodicticity, and nality must yield to justness, every narration being provisional and
susceptible to improvement. Indeed, narrations are constantly re-narrativized, whether
by their initial authors or by these authors’ critics, there being no end to the process that
consists in the attenuation of narrative misadjustment.
Its inscriptive role – narration inscribes foreign law – means that the compara-
tist’s text silently determines the foreign law that it replaces. In particular, for the many
readers who do not enjoy a fully edged access to foreign law, the narration becomes
an authoritative source of information. The structural contingency informing every
3 HEIDEGGER, M. Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität). In: Gesamtausgabe. vol. 63. K. Bröcker-Olt-
manns (ed.). Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1982 [1923]. p. 83.
4 If there is more than one culture, there must be dierence across those cultures – or so asseverates Leibniz’s
Law, which reads thus: “[B]y virtue of imperceptible variations, two individual things […] must always dier”:
LEIBNIZ, G. W. Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement. In: Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wil-
helm Leibniz. vol. 5. C.I. Gerhardt (ed.). Hildesheim: Olms, 1965 [1764†]. p. 49. This text was written in 1704 and
appeared posthumously.
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