our seminar. The diversity in topics covered and the traditions we chose to study led us to reach an interesting middle ground. My students understood that all legal traditions had to be subject to interpretation and had to develop some adaptive qualities in order to be sustainable. For my part, I saw stability and a great sense of justice in religious law, understanding that divinity was not a synonym of arbitrariness. I like to believe that I was successful in constructing a more pluralist legal mind for my students and myself thanks to an unconventional teaching environment that seemed more favorable to the development of different perspectives on the law. My students proved to me that their ability to “learn the law” or to “learn how to think the law” was much greater when constructing their own legal understanding of concepts derived from multiple sources. In order to replicate this method we must, as lecturers, find a place for the constructivist approach in our traditional law schools and apply it across the curriculum to better teach comparative law. Indeed, varied teaching approaches are more likely to reach a greater number of students. Legal educators trained through untraditional environments will prepare future lawyers to complex work environments and raise their awareness to a set of skills they need to develop as future counsels. It is now time for legal academia to change its point of view on the teaching of law and relay the valuable contribution of untraditional teaching approaches. For this prisons are ideal microcosms that challenge young academics. Diversity in the student body as well as the unusual setting of the facility can expose a new comparative dimension to the teaching of many legal topics. TRADITIONAL COMPARATIVE LAW TEACHING A case can certainly be made for comparative law in any law teaching institution. The sense of open-mindedness inherent to this subject liberates students from the narrow confines of their national legal systems. It is also right to believe that “[t]he work of comparing laws and institutions is very necessary, for the only way to perceive any object clearly is to compare it with something else.” Thus, taking a closer look at the initial goals set forth by European faculties and American law schools for comparative law teaching in
This phenomenon in some respect is also present in the United where what is encompassed in the realm of the legal education tends to be more focused on domestic law. Indeed, despite the globalization of legal services, comparative law is still not playing a prominent role in law schools’ curriculums. Perhaps it is the diversity of the American legal system with its two levels of jurisdiction (state and federal) that already make the study of national law a complex and somewhat comparative enterprise that discourages students to enroll in courses dedicated to the study of a foreign system of law. Mathias Reimann and many scholars have also blamed “the parochial attitude and the lack of international sophistication of American lawyers for the marginal role of comparative law.” However, it may be more the case that the objectives American scholars have set for themselves with regard to the teaching of this topic are too broad and confusing. Courses in comparative law in the United States aim at tackling too many topics. The following are only the 10 reasons most often cited by Professors to justify engaging in the comparative study of law: Provide foreign models for the improvement of domestic law Promote the international unification (or at least harmonization) of law Reveal the common core of all law Teach basic skills for international legal practice Provide an overview of law on a world-wide scale by introducing the major legal families Acquire some knowledge about certain foreign legal systems Become familiar with foreign rules, concepts, and approaches in order to facilitate communication with foreign lawyers Compare the national system of law with foreign alternatives in order to provide critical perspectives on the domestic legal system Help students understand law as a general phenomenon, in particular its contingency on history, society, politics, and economics