Comparative Law and the Breaking of the Vessels

The essay attempts to shed light on some examples of the relationship between prescriptive and descriptive, norms and facts in comparative law. In particular, it examines: the methodological choices (in the alternative between normative paradigms and open pluralism), the ontology of the law (in the alternative between abstract dogmatism and experiential realism), the act of dividing the global spatiality into different units of legal meaning (in the alternative between neutral observation and constructive projectuality). Capturing the tension between doubt, displacement, rupture (on the one side) and recovery, revision, creative renewal (on the other side) that has marked the genealogy of an “undisciplined discipline”, the Author proposes to assign it for the future a space of inter-esse, an interstitial threshold in which every binary opposition can be dynamically resolved.