Recent technological and methodological advances can accelerate a more systematic approach to analyzing concepts in comparative law and associating them with empirical phenomena. The group’s approach seeks to create frameworks and tools to assess the full complexity of concepts in comparative law, identifying the spectrum of related concepts without privileging one over another. This contrasts with approaches in other fields, notably biology and psychiatry, that have handled the challenge of concept proliferation differently, instead standardizing to a single term (and thus a single view) to represent each concept. The group’s network approach seeks instead to facilitate dialogue and integration across proliferating concepts in comparative law to allow for capacious, but coordinated, conceptual frameworks that reflect the full complexity of the socio-legal world they seek to capture.
This interest group supports collaboration among scholars interested in the systematic comparison, integration, and application of concepts in comparative law. To do so, it seeks to maintain the interest group as a community for scholars from diverse fields and regions who are interested in collaborating on these issues; to convene collaborative meetings that allow participants to present their research and share data, methods, and best practices in concept and research design in comparative law; to create a public repository for concepts in comparative law to provide a foundation for concept integration across diverse research groups globally; and to share new digital tools that search for concepts in ontologies and related documents such as laws, court rulings, and constitutions.
The group launched the new Sartori.network platform and other open-source digital tools that allow researchers to collaborate in mapping the conceptual landscape of law and political science, compare new topics to established conceptual frameworks, and compare topics across multiple texts in laws, court rulings, and constitutions. The concept repository is a key first step in the group’s objective to foster information sharing and collaboration among scholars in comparative law. It includes topic sets from multiple research groups around the world and interactive tools that allow users to explore these vocabularies. This allows scholars to explore concepts related to their own, compare how researchers in different fields and regions have conceptualized similar topics, and build new vocabularies around specific topics.
Beyond the project’s current tools, the interest group aims to chart a broader course that includes the ideas and work of members around the world.
