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Christian Marxsen
Comparative law and international law have traditionally been treated as two distinct specializations. International law is concerned with the interstate legal framework, while comparative law aims to study different legal systems, gaining an understanding of their respective similarities and differences, and developing practical conclusions with regard to the legal regulation of specific phenomena. However, in the last decade an interest has emerged in the comparative law dimensions of public international law. The research agenda of “comparative international law” investigates the differences in approaches to international law.1 It engages with the inherent pluralism of international law and aspires to map and understand the diverse interpretations of international norms by various actors, depending on, among other things, their geographical origin or differences in legal traditions.2 Till Markus’ German monograph Rechtsvergleichung im Völkerrecht (“Comparative Law Within International Law”) adds to this relatively new line of works on the comparative law dimensions of international law, but it employs a more general perspective. The book is, above all, a contribution to the discussion on the sources of international law, it and strives to uncover and appraise where the sources of international law rely on or link to methods of comparative law. Markus demonstrates that comparative methods are, even if partly entrenched, relevant in many regards and deserve more systematic reflection. In that sense his approach does not use comparative legal analysis as a tool to analyze how existing norms are interpreted and operationalized, rather, he aims to systematize how their very existence depends on comparative law methods. In doing so, Markus connects those disciplines, bringing them even closer, and showing, on the one hand, that international law is an interesting and thus far often overlooked object of study for comparative lawyers, and, on the other hand, that scholarship and practice in international law may benefit from drawing on the methodological repertoire of comparative law.
