Basic Transformation of Legal Pictures: Purpose and Method of Comparative Law

The article argues that comparative jurisprudence should be re‑grounded in a constructivist, autopoietic understanding of law and in an explicitly spatial conception of legal reality, rather than in the traditional search for universal methods or neutral functional equivalents. Law is treated as an autonomous communicative system that reproduces itself through legal constructions, with legal norms, institutions, and formants understood as segments of these deeper constructions that exist simultaneously at the level of public consciousness, positive legal texts, and concrete legal practice. On this basis, the text criticizes method universalism (functionalism, law and economics, etc.), contending that every comparative method is culture‑bound and only becomes epistemically meaningful within a specific “meta‑epistemic” paradigm and legal tradition accepted by the participants in legal communication.

The article links the plurality and conflict of legal cultures to the differentiation of legal space into distinct loci: national legal orders, emergent city law, regional/meta‑legal regimes, and a rapidly forming virtual legal space. It emphasizes the historically constitutive role of urban law (ius civile) and its dialectic with the ius gentium in generating the Western legal tradition’s communicative code, and suggests that this tradition’s nationally organized repertoire is now exhausted, producing a structural crisis that manifests in quasi‑states, “mutant” legal cultures, and the erosion of international legality. Against this background, legal urbanism and comparative‑institutional analysis are proposed as methodological avenues for understanding how inclusive institutions and open‑access orders are rooted in specific legal traditions and cannot be transplanted as neutral, universally functional devices.

A further claim is that conflicts between civilizations are, at bottom, clashes between structures of consciousness that are crystallized in legal constructions, rather than mere terminological or institutional divergences that could be overcome through linguistic unification or formal harmonization. The article, therefore, reconceives actors of law as representations of particular communication codes generated by autopoietic legal cultures, and insists that legal communication becomes possible only where a shared legal tradition provides a common code, while at the same time recognizing that each legal culture has value only for its own members and does not necessarily correspond to any “civilizational ideal.” In this setting, comparative jurisprudence’s central contemporary task is framed as identifying the conditions under which legal communication across heterogeneous, often conflictual legal spaces remains possible, especially in relation to emergent virtual legal constructions (AI, social credit, virtual property, smart contracts, and virtual public spaces) that further complicate the legal map of the world.