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Pritzker Legal Research Center


Foreign Legal Research Guide

A guide to researching foreign law

What Is Comparative Law?

Comparative law is the study of similarities and differences between the legal system of more than one country. Prior to finding the laws of different countries and comparing them on your own, save time by first checking to see if someone else has done this work already. Books and journal articles are excellent sources of comparative law analysis. 

In NUsearch, you can search for the term comparative as a keyword along with the topic of interest (e.g., comparative corporate law, etc.). 

Another good strategy is to type in the countries you are interested in comparing as keywords along with the topic. The country names will often appear in the table of contents and thus will be retrieved by the catalog search. For instance, although the following book does not have the term "comparative law" in its title (Advancing the Human Right to Health), the table of contents indicates that the book contains a section that will compare the right to health in various countries, so a search for something like "right to health" in addition to country names would have retrieved this book in the catalog. 

Subject law collections are useful for obtaining copies of laws from different countries pertaining to a specific topic. Please see the Subject Collections of Laws section of this guide for guidance. 

Online Comparative Law Resources