Center for Anglo-American Legal Tradition

About the Centre

The Center for Anglo-American Legal Tradition at the Faculty of Law and Administration, University of Łódź challenges and then bridges the gap between the Anglo-American and continental law legal spheres through rigorous academic research with an eye toward improving and informing legal practice. Accordingly, the research output of the Center for Anglo-American Legal Tradition is not aimed at pure theory of law or debating definitions of disparate legal phenomena, but instead seeks to combine the theory of law with legal practice in order to extract and explicate content that is of universal value across various legal systems. While the Center for Anglo-American Studies remains dedicated to the regular publication of articles, books, case reviews, conferences and other academic materials, the Center’s research emphasis on legal methodology, case selection, presentation of argumentation, coherency of legal reasoning, collection of evidence, and appropriateness of applying various legal procedures will improve discourse of international, comparative law scholars as well as legal practitioners alike.

Within the history and theory of law, the Anglo-American world—or common law—and the broader European body of law—the civil or continental law—have been traditionally divided into separate categories. This has resulted in practicing lawyers and scholars generally dividing themselves into specialization of one or the other. Recent scholarship challenges this orthodoxy on two fronts. First, it has demonstrated that the two are more closely connected than the traditional view has acknowledged, and second that international institutions and legal practice after the Second World War have been strongly influenced by Anglo-American legal thought, e.g. international tribunals, fact-finding commissions, the WTO, etc. For this reason, studying the Anglo-American legal tradition has great merit even for civil or continental lawyers as well as legal scholars.

The research in the Centre will focus on several aspects of Anglo-American Legal Tradition:

• The comparison of responses to different legal questions across varying Anglo-American jurisdictions.
• The comparison of Anglo-American legal concepts with known concepts in broadly understood continental legal systems.
• The development of Anglo-American idea from an evolutionary perspective, i.e. referring to the transfer of the ideas between different Anglo-American jurisdictions.
• The conceptualization of Anglo-American constitutional thought.

Scientific Board of the Centre

• Dr hab. Jan Halberda (Jagiellonian University)
• Prof. David Ibbetson (University of Cambridge)
• Prof. Amalia Kessler (Stanford Law School)
• Prof. Thomas J. McSweeney (William & Mary Law School)