International Comparative Law
When I was in seminary I had a professor who encouraged us to read scripture through a lens other than our own. He would always encourage us to take a historical perspective and to see things outside of our own lens.
In many ways this is the same approach to a global studies class. While we are comparing the law in a foreign country to our own legal system, we would be doing the Scottish legal system a disservice to merely compare and contrast it to ours.
The legal system in Scotland evolved organically over centuries of history, change, and a process of refinement. This history existed and occurred completely separate from our own, and yet our own legal system serves as a foundation of which we may be able to better understand a system that is unlike ours.
In order to be able to successfully compare legal systems, one must have a foundation rooted in their own legal heritage. This allows a person to then compare and contrast the system to another, finding the idiosyncrasies and quirks of the other system as well as their own. When doing comparative legal studies, it is imperative to keep this delicate dialectic in tension in order to preserve the cultural and legal heritage of the other system, but also remain rooted in their own system to dissect the two systems appropriately.
I was floored during the first two days of our class sessions as we studied Scottish legal history and the ways in which it came to be formed. To see a system that developed over at least a thousand years that, in many ways, differs from the American legal system demonstrates how context plays a pivotal role in the law. In essence, the law is shaped over time through context and legal issues that arise. This gives us insight into why the law is the way that it is today.