The Life and Times of a Local Court Judge in Berlin

Extract

In the study of comparative law and legal systems, a problem of focus and perspective presents itself. Comparative scholars often examine the “important” cases decided by appellate courts of foreign nations and the writings of their most important scholars. In Anglo-American nations, jurists are taught in law school, and then in the practice of law to look for authoritative texts, which are often the words of appellate court judges who set precedent. The results of these searches for the authoritative, both in national as well as comparative legal research, may be that scholars do not give enough attention to the average and the pedestrian, but rather focus upon the exceptional, the appellate, the influential and the newsworthy.