For some comparatists, the grouping of legal systems - as such - may serve an important purpose since it gives the comparatist a utility that is similar to that experienced by, say, botanists who classify plants and create taxonomies.With this approach, classification and systematisation of systems is as such a sufficient motive. This might make sense, but more rational justification for constructing legal families is likely to be found elsewhere. One useful way to understand the theoretical nature of the concept of legal groups is to look at them basically as MaxWeber’s “ideal-types”.30 These refer “to the construction of certain elements of reality into a logically precise conception”.31 By means of theoretical macro-constructs, comparatists through analysis can comprehend (preliminarily) a legal system which they come across for the first time or with which they are completely unfamiliar. In macro-comparative law, legal family or grouping of systems is a theoretical construction, by means of which it is easier to conceive existing legal systems. In micro-comparative law, existing legal systems are, in a way, compared to the ideal-types arrived at in the macro-classification. When the major characteristics of a legal family are known (e.g. use of legal sources, status of customary law, systematics, judicial structure), foreign law can be initially conceived as being reasonably rational, instead of approaching the complex content of a legal system on the basis of fragmented and vast material, or accepting one’s own system as a norm.32 In fact, no existing legal system has ever absolutely identical characteristics with an ideal, fully refined type of legal family, which is the culmination of the typical features of its actual models.33 re cht swi s s e n scha f t al s j ur i st i sch e dok t r i n 114 30 For detailed discussion of the “ideal-type” see Dirk Käsler, Max Weber: An Introduction to his Life andWork(University of Chicago Press, Chicago1988) pp.180-184. 31 H.H. Gerth & C.Wright Mills,“The Man and HisWork” at 59 (published originally in1946), in FromMaxWeber: Essays in Sociology edited, with an Introduction by Gerth & Mills (Oxford University Press, NewYork 1993) pp. 3-74. 32 John C. Reitz says (at 623) that while using “...ideals as a common point of departure for comparison, one must be on guard against the natural tendency to use without reflection the ideals of one’s own system as the normative measure for systems that may not accept the ideal.”Reitz,“How to Do Comparative Law”, 46 American Journal of Comparative Law(1998) 617-636. 33 The discussion here does not specifically concern divisions of legal cultures, but the theoretical nature is very much the same; ideal typical macro-construction. See Mark van Hoecke and MarkWarrington who separate western and non-western (Asian, Islamic,African) legal cultures,“Legal Cultures, Paradigms and Legal Doctrine: Towards a New Model for Comparative Law”, 47 International and Comparative Law Quarterly (1998) 495-536.
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