We stand at a curious moment in the history of law and technology. Nations around the world are scrambling to regulate or deregulate artificial intelligence, each convinced they are in a “race”—for dominance, for values, for the future itself. Brussels votes on comprehensive AI Acts. Beijing issues the world’s first copyright ruling on AI-generated content. Washington debates whether chatbots should have First Amendment rights. The underlying premise of this volume is that this framing as a zero-sum competition fundamentally misunderstands both the nature of AI and the task before us. The truth is more sobering and more hopeful: We are not racing against each other but experimenting together, trying to govern technologies that respect neither borders nor traditional legal categories. The real question is not who will “win” the AI race, but how we can learn from each other’s experiments fast enough to keep pace with systems that evolve by the microsecond. This Special Issue of the German Law Journal brings together fifteen contributions that demonstrate why comparative law has never been more essential—or more challenging. The authors span continents and legal traditions, from Beijing to Brussels, from Silicon Valley to Sydney.

This article examines the new provisions on contract interpretation and characterisation in Book 5 of the Belgian Civil Code, which entered into force on 1 January 2023. The reform preserves Belgium’s traditional subjective approach to interpretation, prioritising the parties’ common intention over literal textual meaning, contrasting with the objective or mixed approaches adopted by French law and international instruments. Regarding characterisation, Belgium introduces innovative provisions explicitly addressing contract classification and mixed contracts, filling gaps left by other legal systems. These aspects of the Belgian reform are put intto perspective with comparative observations drawn mostly from French, German, and Dutch law.

This article concerns the ‘rule in Gibbs’: a controversial principle of English private international law which provides that a debt is only discharged in a foreign insolvency proceeding if the contract is governed by the law of that proceeding. Critics of the rule consider that it undermines the foundation of corporate insolvency as a unitary process in which individual collection efforts are replaced by a collective proceeding for all creditors. This article offers a qualified defence of the rule. It suggests that it could be abandoned in ‘true’ insolvency cases, in which the company’s assets are sold to a third party and the proceeds distributed to its creditors, but only if the rule is replaced with a cross-border insolvency law framework. It also suggests, however, that Gibbs is the ‘right’ rule in a cross-border corporate restructuring, in which only some of the company’s creditors stay with the firm to benefit from any future upside that the third party would otherwise capture in a sale. It argues that European Union private international law adopts this approach to a restructuring and that the Gibbs rule is, therefore, not nearly as exceptional as it is sometimes made out to be.

This article compares the 20 canons promulgated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 with the canons of the Church of England today. The author identifies a degree of consistency between the two sets of canons, especially when it comes to their treatment of diocesan episcopacy, synodality, metropolitical authority, primatial honour, and supra-metropolitical authority.

Legal changes stimulated by economic liberalisation and European Union governance have led some observers to speak of the ‘Americanisation’ of European law. Focussing on the dynamics of legal change and resistance in European member states, this article questions the extent of trans-Atlantic legal convergence, noting six important differences between European and American law that are unlikely to disappear.

Juridical ecumenism is a branch of ecclesionomology: the study of church law as a form of applied ecclesiology. It involves the comparative study of the laws and other regulatory entities of different ecclesial traditions and their institutional churches, as well as the practice of church law and ecumenism. It does not seek to replace the historic focus on theology and doctrine in ecumenical dialogue, but rather to remedy the missing legal link in the ecumenical enterprise to date, by using church laws as a rich unifying instrument for greater visible communion between separated institutional churches. One fruit of juridical ecumenism is the issue of the Statement of Principles of Christian Law by an Ecumenical Panel in 2016 and its launch at the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 2022. Marking the 1700th anniversary of the great Council of Nicaea and its Canons gives us the opportunity to think critically, as an exercise in juridical ecumenism, about continuity and change over the centuries in the nature of church law. We can achieve this by comparing the Statement of Principles of Chistian Law (2016) issued by the Ecumenical Christian Law Panel with the Nicene Canons (325) issued by the first Ecumenical Council. This article explores the similarities and differences between these two juridical entities – in terms of their (1) nature, authority, and reception; (2) subject matter; (3) sources; (4) purposes; and (5) internal structure – and what the Nicene Canons and the Christian Law Principles tell us about these five aspects of church law itself. I conclude with reflections on the value of comparison for the future of juridical ecumenism.

This article analyses the ongoing relevance of the Canons of Nicaea to our approach to clergy discipline today. The article undertakes a comparative analysis, examining the application of the Nicene canons to church discipline from the perspective of both Eastern and Western traditions. The articles concludes with an overview of the new Clergy Conduct Measure 2025 and identifies areas that warrant further ecumenical study and partnership.

This paper examines China’s emerging case law system through an empirical analysis of more than 10,000 court judgments issued between 2019 and 2021. It challenges prevailing academic views that Guiding Cases are ‘de facto binding’ on Chinese courts and that China’s case law system could be interpreted through a common law lens. Instead, the study shows that the Chinese approach is characterised by distinct objectives, methodologies, and applications. The paper further highlights the practice of ‘mandatory search for similar cases’, which has substantially expanded the role of cases in judicial decision-making. China’s case law system remains in its formative stages, marked by notable uncertainties and challenges. This research underscores the importance of sustained empirical inquiry into legal rules and practices to better understand the trajectory of China’s case law system and the broader implications of this novel approach for contemporary judicial practice.

This article analyses the role of comparative analysis in free movement judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). It argues that comparative analysis plays an important role in how the CJEU decides the outcome of free movement cases and that free movement law should thus be characterised as a comparative law method. The argument is developed in three steps. First, comparative analysis takes place in all structural parts of free movement cases. It is not exclusively or even primarily limited to the proportionality test. Second, the role of comparative analysis is directly linked to the effective application of the free movement provisions. This means that comparative analysis is not only relied on to engage in standard-setting (‘calibration’) in free movement cases—it is also used to determine which cases should fall within the scope of application of the free movement provisions (‘demarcation’). Third, because of the close relationship between comparative analysis and the effective application of the free movement provisions, it is possible to characterise negative integration as a comparative law method. Although one component of this method is based on the traditional functional method in comparative law, the main comparative method in free movement law is closely linked to cosmopolitan pluralism, because negative integration provides a ‘frame’ or structure through which Member States are required to investigate and respond to the national laws of other Member States. This method can be described as ‘the law of differentiation’, because it identifies, analyses the extent and assesses the legitimacy of differences in national laws in the context of the internal market.

In recent years, courts across the world have increasingly held governments accountable for addressing climate change. While such rulings have fueled optimism about constitutional law as a vehicle for climate ambition, this Article argues that the role of constitutional law in advancing climate goals is far more complex and contested. Constitutions encapsulate diverse and sometimes conflicting values, which can create tensions when courts adjudicate climate policies. As government climate measures become more concrete, conflicts arise between rights, institutional structures, and political realities. Drawing on examples from Germany, Canada, and Mexico, this Article highlights the challenges of adjudicative uncertainty, the underspecificity of constitutional norms, and the polyvocality of constitutional values in the context of climate change. This Article concludes with recommendations for judges to adopt a principled, context-sensitive approach to constitutional climate adjudication, balancing the urgency of climate action with the complexities of state capacity and constitutional structures.