wavs ()t legal thinking rare thing tor academics to notice and pass (^n to practitioners the nature ot these ditterences. d'he verv tact that the statutor\' rule is the same mav well cause legal thinkingon it in ditterent countries to con\ erge. 1 think I have no need to stress that 1 have long held that a transplanted rule is not the same thing as it was in its previous home/ Nor need 1 stress my long-held \ iew that it is rules- not just statutory rules-institutions, legal concepts, and structures that are horn)- wed, not the 'spirit' of a legal svstem. Rules, institutions, concepts, and structures might almost he termed tangibles, can easily he reduced to writing, and are accessihle. - that, I think, is Legrand's point. But it is no II Ne.\t, on Pierre Legrand and his differences with me 1 come to his concluding section § lo, 'C'omparative Legal Studies Otherwise.' He has dismissed 'legal transplants,'^' and this is his alternative approach. He begins; rhe ethics of comparative anaivsis ot law lie elsewhere. C'omparative legal studv is best regarded as the hermeneutic explication and mediation ot different forms ot legal experience within a descriptive and critical metalanguage. Because insensitit itv to questions of cultural heterogeneitv fails to do justice to the situated, local properties of knowledge, the comparatist must never abolish the distance between self and other. Rather, she must allow the self to make the journev and see the other in the wav he must he seen, that is, as other. The comparatist must permit the other to realize 'bis \ ision ot bis world.' Defining a legal culture or tradition for the comparatist mean.s, therefore, 'finding what is significant in [its] difference from others.' Comparison must not have a unif\ ing but a multiplving effect: it must aim to See most recently, Watson, Out of Context, p. i 'Impossibility,' pp. i23f. 8 9 104
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