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We can only claim to understand another legal system when we know the context surrounding the positive law in which lawyers are trained. To avoid ethnocentricity and superficiality, we must go beyond judicial decisions, doctrinal writings and the black-letter law of codes and statutes and probe the 'deeper structures' where law meets cultural, political, socio-economic factors. It is only when we acquire such awareness and knowledge of the critical factors affecting both the backgrounds and implications of rules that it becomes possible to control the present and possibly future developments of the world's legal institutions. This collection of essays aims to provide the reader with a fundamental understanding of the dynamic relationship between the law and its cultural, political and socio-economic context. Table of Contents Editors' preface. Diapositives v. movies: the inner dynamics of the law and its comparative account: a companion Part I. Knowing Comparative Law: 1. Comparative law and neighbouring disciplines 2. Political ideology and comparative law 3. Economic analysis and comparative law 4. Comparative law and anthropology 5. Comparative law and language Part II. Comparative Law Fields: 6. Comparative studies in private law (insights from a European point of view) 7. Comparative administrative law 8. Comparative constitutional law 9. Comparative criminal justice 10. Comparative civil justice 11. Comparative law and the international organizations Part III. Comparative Law in the Flux of Civilizations: 12. The East-Asian legal tradition 13. The Jewish legal tradition 14. The Islamic legal tradition 15. The Sub-Saharan legal tradition 16. The Latin American and Caribbean legal tradition (repositioning Latin America and the Caribbean in the contemporary maps of comparative law) 17. Mixed legal systems 18. Democracy and the Western legal tradition.