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The chapter deals with Germany. Although the German legal tradition is relatively open to non-mandatory legal inspiration, the sources of such inspiration are nonetheless generally limited to sources of national origin. The practice of three of the supreme federal jurisdictions, the Federal Constitutional Court, the Federal Supreme Court, and the Federal Administrative Court, discloses only sporadic passing references to foreign inspiration, typically within a larger block of citations of domestic case law or scholarship. References to foreign solutions serve as an additional supportive argument. In the German context, however, the limited quantity of direct uses of foreign law by courts should be weighed against the relatively rich comparative law scholarship.

This book reviews selected topics in the law of succession from a comparative and, in some instances, a historical perspective, explaining that the primary function of the law of succession is to identify both the persons entitled to succeed to the deceased and also the property they are to receive. The central thesis of this chapter is that changes in the law of succession have been detected and explained principally by means of comparative scholarship. There are two general issues identified by that scholarship. The first is the significance of social and economic change and its impact on aspects of the law of succession, and the second is that the identification and analysis of these changes have been the stimulus for a new mission for comparative researchers in the field of the law of succession.

This chapter focuses on Professor Smith's approach to affinity. This particular view of Smith is chosen because it reveals important details about his approach to comparative analysis; and the main aim of this chapter is to define T B Smith as a comparative lawyer. It begins by highlighting key statements by Smith regarding affinity and connectedness in order to give some idea of what was important to him. It then considers how the things that mattered to him influenced the way in which he used comparative law. Finally, it describes how he fits into the broader world of comparative legal scholarship.

Leading Reconstruction historian Eric Foner reflects on the state of the field, situating his work within a longer debate and reflecting on some of the key issues raised in this essay collection. Foner emphasizes the influence of the “new social history” on post-civil rights era scholars but acknowledges that students of the period today are likely to regard this body of work as the established orthodoxy rather than the new challenge to dominant interpretations, which it once was. Where this will lead new scholarship is difficult to gauge, but Foner concurs with Holt's assessment in the opening essay that the large body of comparative work on race and emancipation has much to offer students of the US experience, adding his support for the “expansive” approaches that have emerged in recent years—particularly the reconsiderations growing out of a consideration of late nineteenth-century imperialism. Expressing some concern that scholarly attention to national politics has slipped, Foner concludes with a call for a “truly new account” that situates Reconstruction “in the long processes of American and global history.”