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The International days of the Société de Législation Comparée, which took place on April 8 and 9, 2015, aim to bring together legal experts from various profession and horizons to discuss the past, the present and the future of comparative law.

The Congress of Paris, in 1900, was the birth and the starting point of the first development of comparative law at a time of confrontation between different legal systems. Then comparative law was abandoned for several decades during the 20th century. The discipline is becoming a valuable tool again today in a globalised word in which national legal systems are interconnected and hybrid and in which supranational legal system are emerging and overlapping each other. What is the value, in this context, of the comparative study of the law ? In what form and by what methods can comparative law remain relevant ? To what extent does comparative law have legitimacy in guiding our evolving our legal system ?

These are the questions addressed during the two days of presentations and debates. The first day was dedicated to discussions and reflexions to provide perspective on the dynamic of comparative law : its history, within that of the SLC and of its presidents ; the challenges that it must face today ; its place in the circulation of legal models. The workshops on the second day provided a structure in order to deepen these questions on particular themes central to the major challenges that comparative law is facing : the protection of personal data, common goods, the extraterritoriality of the law, insolvency, criminal proceedings in regard of serious economic and financial delinquency, and the elaboration of common models.

The aim of these Days was to build upon the heritage of our founders, who, during the 19th and 20th centuries, saw in comparative law an ‘indicator of the legal orientation’ that enables ‘the legislator to distinguish the road to reform’ with the support of he jurisprudence and the authors ‘who received the foreign footprint and transmitted it to the legislator in order to prepare and facilitate its intervention’ (L. Josserand at the Congress of Paris in 1900).