Global Legal Indicators and Comparative Law: The Factory of Indexes

In recent times, comparative law has moved towards a new type of visualisation of the law, which is mainly based on indexes and indicators. Through these, legal scholars and practitioners measure legal systems against specific benchmarks; they no longer search for commonalities among legal systems but are interested in assessing how the law performs in economic terms. This book critically analyses this ‘quantitative turn’ in comparative law. The work focuses on the role played by social indicators in general, and legal indicators in particular, in contemporary societies. It presents the evaluation of indicators as a pattern of governance as well as a driver promoting a change in the law from ‘outside’. The authors explore a range of issues, including how and why the quantitative turn in comparative law has taken place; how legal indicators are created and for which purposes; whether indicators really act as a new form of legitimisation and law-making and, if so, if it is possible to resist or challenge their power; whether it is fair and equitable to measure the performance of diversified national legal frameworks through such managerial tools of governance; and ultimately, how legal indicators change the way we conceive of the law. The book addresses these issues by focusing on legal indicators, whose global ambitions are often related to societal concerns. To this extent, it examines how both non-economic and economic global indicators might have some bearing on the law. The volume will be of interest to advanced students, researchers, and academics in comparative law, global law, transnational law, constitutional law, and law and economics.