Dmitry Poldnikov, MGIMO University, Moscow, has posted Dialogical Narrative in Comparative Legal History:
As a well-established academic discipline, legal history offers a wide range of methodological tools. Many among them are rooted in the classical paradigm and face the challenge of the "postclassical turn" in humanities. This paper advocates a dialogical approach for legal history, asserting that profound understanding arises from an active "communication" with past legal systems through historians posing meaningful questions to historical documents, a concept drawing from comparative law. It first examines legal history's "vocation," touching upon Savigny's "Volksgeist" and the historicism-universalism debate, before critiquing the limitations of isolated traditional approaches like legal positivism, natural law theory, and sociological jurisprudence, which risk oversimplification or anachronism. As a constructive alternative, the paper advocates for a communicative, narrative-based approach, viewing legal history as a historian-constructed narrative in line with post-classical legal thought. A methodological framework for this dialogical and comparative legal history-encompassing descriptive reconstruction, causal explanation, and critical evaluation-is proposed. This framework is then vividly applied to a detailed comparative analysis of a single casus: the collision of carts from the Digest (D. 9.2.52.2). The paper examines how Roman law, English common law, Romano-canonical ius commune, Sharia (Fiqh), and Imperial Chinese law might have uniquely approached this problem. This micro-historical comparison reveals that the distinct style and substance of these legal traditions are fundamentally shaped by the specific questions they pose and the methods they employ for resolution. The paper concludes by affirming that such a sustained, questioning dialogue with historical legal sources is indispensable for constructing meaningful narratives that illuminate both the particularity of past legal systems and their enduring relevance to contemporary legal understanding.
--Dan Ernst