BOOK REVIEW: William BARBEY on Elgar encyclopedia of comparative law edited by Jan M. Smits, Jaakko Husa, Catherine Valcke and Madalena Narciso (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 2)

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Reviewing a collective work, an encyclopaedia no less, is not an easy task. How do you start your reading? Is one supposed to read it from cover to cover, from the first to the last entry in the order of print? Or is one to focus on the most important entries (and in that case how does one select them)? Put in another way: how can a single reviewer do justice to the work of more than 200 eminent scholars?

I once read that in order to criticise a book, you do not have to read all of it: like the cooking of a steak, one bite is all it takes to tell if the chef was off his game. Nonetheless if the dish is properly made, and if you enjoy even your greens, you will probably be more than tempted to order a pudding.

Not entirely sure of the merit of such a method, I narrowed down a few entries (as if selecting from a menu) according to my own fields of interests (eg ‘comparative jurisprudence’, ‘legal families’, ‘legal history and comparative law’, ‘codification’, ‘estoppel’, ‘trust law’, ‘subjective right(s)’) and out of curiosity (eg ‘Islamic law’, ‘gift’, ‘Iceland’). And so, I dived right into it – just to see if it would satisfy my appetite.

After a while, the many cross-references guided me towards more and more new entries I had at first neglected. And being in the habit to look up words in a (printed) dictionary only to forget the one word I was looking for in the first place (having encountered numerous more interesting definitions in the meantime), I ended being quite astray from my original path, transported to other times and other places: ‘Constitutional Court (Germany)’, ‘lex mercatoria’, ‘Europe small jurisdictions (Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco)’, ‘supervening events and force majeure’.

For a scholar, to be lost in the material is not a curse but a gift. It is the very essence of comparative research: discovering and revealing connections between per se unrelated themes or jurisdictions. One has to be curious and willing to confront oneself to unknown territories (‘it is simply impossible to master all methods that are needed in order to explore all the law at all times and places’, writes Agustín Parise, vol 1, 359). Above all it demands to go beyond one’s comfort zone.

To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History.

DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2580119