Withstanding trendyism and its abrupt brevities, shunning the contemporary’s brisk cadences, this Article compares two salient comparativisms-at-law. While it argues that these models are epistemically irreconcilable in significant respects—and that one approach is emphatically more interpretively empowering than the other—it also claims that neither strategy is able to escape the play of the text. The inevitability of comparativism as play means that every enunciation of foreign law and every comparison-at-law must stand as the comparativist’s invention, as an exercise in self-portraiture also, as an egotrope.