Teaching Comparative Law is everything that makes teaching great. It's an impossible job, because no one is expert in law the world over, so the course can be daunting to teachers and students alike. But the challenge is best undertaken as an opportunity to explore. The joy of teaching Comparative Law for me and my wife, who serves as a law librarian embedded in the course, is that every time, current events and our students' range of interests lead us down new paths.
We wrestle with the problem of what we don't know by consulting experts. This semester, as in past semesters, we were privileged to have had our class enriched by the knowledge and experience of some stars in legal practice and academics. In order of appearance...
Attorney
Wojciech Jarosiński, LL.M. (
on this blog), of the Maruta law firm, stayed up late to join us from Warsaw, Poland. To give us the perspective of a lawyer working in the civil law tradition, he led the class in examining judicial reception of a U.S. punitive damages award in Poland, and then in considering common law and civil law differences in the context of transnational contracting.
Professor Chenglin Liu, St. Mary’s University School of Law, joined from post-freeze Texas to talk about the Chinese response to covid-19. Professor Liu wrote about the Chinese response to SARS in 2005 in a work that the pandemic rendered newly salient. A fellow torts teacher, Professor Liu also indulged student questions around U.S. states' suits against the PRC and the implications for Biden Administration diplomacy.
Professor
Danya Reda, UMass Law, treated our class to an introduction to Islamic Law. Also a fellow torts teacher, Professor Reda teaches an upper-level class on Islamic Law. Before returning to the United States full time, Professor Reda taught at
Peking University School of Transnational Law. Her research examines court reform in global perspective.
Professor
Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, UMass Boston, led the class in a lively discussion of South Africa. She generously shared her latest research findings on marriage and land rights in customary and contemporary law. Besides a doctoral degree from Oxford, Professor Mnisi Weeks holds a law degree from the University of Cape Town, home to the renowned
Centre for Comparative Law in Africa. She serves UMass Boston in the
School for Global Inclusion and Social Development.Professor Leah Wortham, Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America, joined us to talk about the unfolding crisis over judicial independence in Poland. With Professor Fryderyk Zoll, Jagiellonian University, Professor Wortham published the definitive treatment of the subject in 2019. The matter has become only more complicated and more concerning, both within Poland and between Poland and the EU, in the years since.Our thanks to Attorney Jarosiński and Professors Liu, Reda, Mnisi Weeks, and Wortham for contributing to a stellar semester's experience. Watch this blog for a report in May on the students' final papers.
