Charting the Divide Between Common and Civil Law

Thomas Lundmark rightly challenges taxonomic and static appreciation of 'legal families' in the world and does so in the most effective manner, through detailed and informed appreciation of the institutions of specific jurisdictions. England, Sweden, Germany and the U.S.A. are here dynamically compared with one another in terms of prevailing legal philosophy, legal linguistics, legal actors and legal methods. The treatment is erudite and cosmopolitan, the conclusions irresistible. It is a splendid book. --H. Patrick Glenn, Peter M. Laing Professor of Law, McGill University In Charting the Divide Between Common and Civil Law, Thomas Lundmark explains what makes legal systems unique and questions the value of the conventional distinction between 'civil law' and 'common law' systems. He illustrates this through an impressive survey of scholarship, particularly on Germany and the USA, as well as England and Wales and Sweden. He offers a sophisticated picture of legal reasoning that includes the structure of language and jurisprudential traditions, professions, and the interpretation of statutes and precedents. He demonstrates convincingly that such a picture reveals the individuality of legal systems and the need to avoid traditional stereotypes in the classification of legal families. --John Bell, Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, UK This book is different! It is not about comparison at the level of specific doctrines of private law such as contract or tort law. Instead, it reaches out to the structural level and touches the very core of the different approaches that we can discern between Common Law and Civil Law. Lundmark's book offers new and fascinating deeper insights even to a reader who has been engaged in comparative law from an academic as well as from a practical aspect for decades. --Professor Dr. Ingeborg Schwenzer, LL.M., Basel/Switzerland