CONCEPT INTEGRATION IN COMPARATIVE LAW

ABOUT

Analysts of laws and constitutions have long explored the origins and evolution of legal ideas—to understand why legal regimes succeed and falter, when legal ideas gain traction, and how they shape people’s lives. Yet it is hard to analyze these questions across different countries and contexts without a coordinated approach to naming and conceptualizing these ideas.

In some fields, systematizing and organizing concepts has been a central concern, and has even led to high levels of consensus on categories and terms. In other fields, such as law and political science, concepts are less regulated. Proliferation of conceptual frameworks in these domains has real consequences. It constrains systematic comparison and alignment of findings across studies, and in turn, constrains the accumulation of knowledge.

Recent technological and methodological advances can accelerate a more systematic approach to analyzing concepts in comparative law and associating them with empirical phenomena. Our approach seeks to create frameworks and tools to assess the full complexity of concepts in comparative law, identifying the spectrum of related concepts without privileging one over another. This contrasts with approaches in other fields, notably biology and psychiatry, that have handled the challenge of concept proliferation differently, instead standardizing to a single term (and thus a single view) to represent each concept. Our network approach seeks instead to facilitate dialogue and integration across proliferating concepts in comparative law to allow for capacious, but coordinated, conceptual frameworks that reflect the full complexity of the socio-legal world they seek to capture.

This interest group supports collaboration among scholars interested in the systematic comparison, integration, and application of concepts in comparative law. To do so, it seeks to:

• Maintain the interest group as a community for scholars from diverse fields and regions who are interested in collaborating on these issues,
• Convene collaborative meetings that allow participants to present their research and share data, methods, and best practices in concept and research design in comparative law,
• Create a public repository for concepts in comparative law to provide a foundation for concept integration across diverse research groups globally, and
• Share new digital tools that search for concepts in ontologies and related documents such as laws, court rulings, and constitutions.

The concept repository is a key first step in the group’s objective to foster information sharing and collaboration among scholars in comparative law. It will include topic sets from publishers and individual authors, related document sets, and interactive tools that allow users to explore these vocabularies and documents. This will allow scholars to explore concepts related to their own, compare how researchers in different fields and regions have conceptualized similar topics, build new vocabularies around specific topics, and find these concepts in related documents.

More information on the project’s current tools is available on the Concept Integration in Comparative Law website. This ICON-S interest group aims to chart a broader course, however, to include the ideas and work of members around the world.