Seán Patrick Donlan (University of Limerick) has posted Comparative Law and Hybrid Legal Traditions - an Introduction (COMPARATIVE LAW AND HYBRID LEGAL TRADITIONS, Eleanor Cashin-Ritaine, Sean Patrick Donlan, and Martin Sychold, eds., Swiss Institute of Comparative Law, 2010) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
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The ubiquity of hybridity, both legal and normative, has important consequences for comparative law and legal theory. Most obviously, it challenges legal nationalism, positivism, centralism, and monism. More immediately, it undermines the dissection of plural and dynamic traditions into discrete, closed legal families or systems. But the study of legal and normative hybridity may permit us to create more accurate, useful, and accessible general accounts of the law. If this remains, "more art than science," it is the study of both the, "law in action," and the, "‘living law." To avoid the terminological confusions of existing scholarship on mixed systems, "hybrid legal traditions," might reflect the attempt both (i) to look at more complex legal mixes than the European hybrids that dominate comparative law and mixed scholarship and (ii) to develop a reasonable, coherent way to place law within wider normative orders.
