Comparative Philosophy of Comparative Law

Abstract

Cultural anthropology and sociological jurisprudence have shown that there is no culture or society without normative legal procedures for settling the disputes of its people. Moreover, these legal procedures vary in their normative ethical content. So different is this content from culture to culture that the anthropologist Professor E. A. Hoebel has found it necessary to introduce seven normatively different sets of postulates in order to describe the legal norms of seven so-called primitive peoples. Such facts remind us that in comparative law and philosophy it is very dangerous to use the words "good" or "just" unless we specify both the culture to which we are referring and its specific set of normative assumptions.