The Dialogues of [Comparative] Law

Abstract

Law is forbidding, correcting, punishing, helping, restoring, rewarding. Law needs tools, of other disciplines too. Language [of law too] is a means of communication and of isolation (wanted or imposed). Expressing law, interpreting law, implementing law, exploiting law needs all sorts of language. Law and economics discover and uncover rational (though still often irrational) choices. Judicial decisions are political decisions, critical legal studies point out. Law is always influenced by politics. Politics can be benefactor and destructor. Rituals as expressions of living law may have double (or multiple) meaning. Law is always influenced by religion – either explicitly or implicitly. Convivencia in the same country of people of different religions and, accordingly, application of different laws of civil status (for example in Liban, in Greece, etc.) is a fact. First nations (in Latin America, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Caribbean, etc.) live together (not really, not always in an idoneous way) with former colonizers and immigrants. Is there a real Convivencia of laws, there (as most countries in Africa have almost managed to achieve), or primacy of one (central) law and exclusion of the others? In many countries, there are different rules for the same issues, according to the particular problems of the persons to whom they apply – hypothetically aiming at the same protection(?). Is it an opposite discrimination or just a means of organizing the way to live together? Co-existence, Com-petition, Com-paring, Con-vivencia: Harmony is feasible, is possible, is not alchemy, it respects and requires the different, in order to be a rich image of life.