„Interest in comparative law often begins with special interest in a particular country, in its culture and language”.
U. Kischel, „Comparative Law”, Oxford University Press 2019, 1.
Legal translation is not only the transfer of words; it is an act of legal communication. The specific difficulties arising from legal translation are strictly related to the concepts and institutions that govern a respective legal system. Law and language are inseparable, which makes it impossible to perform legal translation which reflects the same legal concept, without a base of legal knowledge of the legal systems involved in the translation of a legal text.
The Member of the ILCRC Board of External Collaborators Prof. Dr. Uwe Kischel, LL.M. (Yale), attorney-at-law (New York), Mercator Professor of Public Law, European Law and Comparative Law (North-Eastern Europe) at the University of Greifswald, is a renowned German expert in comparative law. His comprehensive book „Comparative Law” offers a coherent treatment of global legal systems that aims not only to describe their varying norms and legal institutions but to propose a better way of seeking to understand how the overall context of legal systems influences legal thinking and legal practice.
Prof. Uwe Kischel’s comprehensive treatise on comparative law offers a critical introduction to the central tenets of comparative legal scholarship. The first part of the book is dedicated to general aspects of comparative law. The controversial question of methods, in particular, is addressed by explaining and discussing different approaches, and by developing a contextual approach that seeks to engage with real-world issues and give a practitioner’s angle on contemporary comparative legal scholarship. The second part of the book offers a detailed treatment of the major legal contexts across the globe, including common law, civil law systems (based on Germany and France as well as case studies of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and Latin America, among others), the African context (with an emphasis on customary law), Asian jurisdictions, Islamic law and law in Islamic countries (plus a brief treatment of Jewish law and canon law), and transnational contexts (public international law, European Union law, and lex mercatoria).
The book is originally available in German: https://www.amazon.de/Rechtsvergleichung-Uwe-Kischel/dp/3406675859
You can also use its English translation by Andrew Hammel: https://www.amazon.com/Comparative-Law-Uwe-Kischel/dp/0198791356
Both versions work with marginal numbers, which additionally simplifies the comparison. The book is highly recommended for legal translators and lawyers.
