Teaching and Researching Comparative Law in a Multipolar and Technological World – 2026 Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) Annual Conference – Part 4
Reflections from the SEALS 2026 Annual Conference
Today, I had the pleasure of contributing on “The Future of Comparative Law in a Multipolar and Technological World” to the discussion group “Teaching and Researching in Civil and Comparative Law” at the 2026 Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) Annual Conference.
The full long post is available at https://lnkd.in/d5MmxDjt
The session offered an important opportunity to reflect not only on the future of comparative legal scholarship, but also on the changing conditions under which we teach law. Our discussion moved across civil-law and common-law traditions, legal history, cultural and institutional context, student preparation, artificial intelligence, assessment, and the place of comparative methodology throughout the law-school curriculum.
One of the themes I was particularly interested in discussing concerned the future of comparative law in an increasingly multipolar legal order.
For decades, much of comparative law concentrated primarily on comparisons among Western legal systems or on legal transplants originating from a relatively limited number of jurisdictions. The contemporary legal landscape, however, is changing rapidly.
China, India, Brazil, and other emerging powers are increasingly developing distinctive legal and regulatory models that both shape and challenge existing international legal frameworks. Rather than understanding legal influence as flowing predominantly from West to East, comparative lawyers must now account for a far more complex, multidirectional circulation of legal ideas, institutional practices, and regulatory approaches.
This evolution raises important methodological questions:
• How should comparative lawyers identify and evaluate legal innovation across different legal traditions?
• How should we assess institutional legitimacy when several governance models coexist, interact, and compete?
• How should comparative legal methodology respond to legal pluralism and the growing diversity of regulatory approaches within global governance?
• How can we compare legal systems without reducing them to isolated rules, statutes, or judicial decisions detached from their historical, political, cultural, and institutional settings?
These questions have become central not only to comparative law, but also to international law, global governance, legal education, political economy, and law and technology. They require us to reconsider assumptions that have traditionally shaped comparative legal scholarship and to recognize that comparison is not merely a descriptive exercise. It is also a method for evaluating institutional choices, regulatory trade-offs, distributions of authority, and competing understandings of social and economic order.
These reflections build upon research I have published in the Asian Journal of Law & Society with Cambridge University Press:
China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Its Impact on the Energy Independence of the European Union (2025)
China’s Path to Modernization and Legal Pluralism: Transplants and the Belt and Road Initiative (2025)
Both articles examine how contemporary developments associated with China’s modernization and the Belt and Road Initiative contribute to broader debates about legal pluralism, comparative law, energy governance, legal transplantation, and the evolution of global governance.
At the same time, the discussion reinforced another point that has become increasingly important in my teaching: comparative law should not be confined to a single specialized course.
Comparative analysis can be incorporated throughout the curriculum, including in technology law, climate change law, energy law, secured transactions, international economic law, environmental law, corporate governance, and other doctrinal fields. Students benefit when they are asked not only what a legal rule provides, but why a particular jurisdiction selected one institutional arrangement rather than another, what interests that arrangement protects, and which costs or trade-offs it produces.
In this sense, comparative law is not simply the study of foreign law. It is a method of legal reasoning that allows students to question what may otherwise appear natural, inevitable, or universal within their own legal system.
Comparative legal education in the age of artificial intelligence
A substantial part of our conversation also concerned the growing influence of artificial intelligence on legal education.
My own approach is not to assume that AI can simply be eliminated from students’ work. Instead, legal educators must redesign parts of the learning and assessment process so that students remain responsible for developing, understanding, and defending their own analysis.
In several of my courses, I use an iterative and interactive process. Students do not merely submit a final presentation or written product. They first propose a topic connected to the subjects covered in the course. I respond by asking them to narrow, reframe, or clarify the project. They then submit a more developed structure, identify the legal questions they intend to address, and explain how the project relates to the course. I respond again before they proceed to the final stage.
The value of this process is that assessment does not depend exclusively on the polished final product. It also considers how students respond to questions, criticism, and changing expectations throughout the development of their work.
In courses such as Technology Law and Climate Change Law, I have also used group presentations followed by questions from both the professor and the other students. The question-and-answer component is particularly important. A student may use AI or other technological tools in preparing a presentation, but the student must still be able to explain the argument, defend the sources, respond to objections, and demonstrate genuine command of the material.
Similarly, for individual projects, I have sometimes required several stages of consultation before the final submission. In another teaching context, when asynchronous participation made sustained classroom interaction more difficult, I added a brief oral examination connected to the students’ group projects. Most of the times, students were able to defend their analysis very effectively.
This experience reinforced an important principle: the objective should not necessarily be to prove whether a student used AI, but to determine whether the student has acquired intellectual ownership of the final work.
Even when AI has assisted with brainstorming, organization, language, or preliminary research, students must still be able to verify the authorities, identify omissions, explain the reasoning, and defend the result. A professionally written document is not equivalent to legal understanding.
From final products to visible intellectual processes
Artificial intelligence therefore makes it increasingly important to evaluate the process of legal reasoning, rather than focusing exclusively on a final paper or examination.
In some of my courses, I have reduced the weight placed on conventional research papers and instead required shorter policy briefs linked to presentations, classroom exchanges, and iterative project development. A one-page policy brief may reveal more about a student’s capacity to identify a problem, select the most relevant information, formulate a position, and communicate it clearly than a long paper whose authorship and intellectual development are difficult to assess.
The central challenge is that this model demands more sustained engagement from faculty. Interactive assessment can involve repeated feedback, consultations, presentations, oral questions, and evaluation of several stages of a project. It is more labor-intensive than receiving a single final submission.
Nevertheless, it may provide a more accurate assessment of student learning in an environment where highly polished text can be produced almost instantaneously.
The process also makes legal reasoning visible. Students can observe how a broad idea becomes a workable research question, how a topic must be narrowed, how an argument changes in response to criticism, and how legal analysis develops through revision rather than appearing fully formed at the end.
The ultimate goal is to help students internalize that method so that, when they become lawyers, they can independently ask:
• Is the proposed answer complete?
• Are the sources real, authoritative, and relevant?
• Has an important jurisdiction, doctrine, argument, or counterargument been omitted?
• Does the conclusion actually follow from the authorities?
• Is the analysis responsive to the specific legal problem?
• Can I explain and defend this work without relying on the technology that helped produce it?
AI as a reason to teach technology law more broadly
I also emphasized that the growing institutional enthusiasm for courses specifically devoted to artificial intelligence should be accompanied by a broader foundation in Technology Law.
AI is only one dimension of the larger relationship among technology, law, institutions, markets, and society. Students should understand not only how AI systems operate or how they may be used in legal practice, but also the broader consequences of technological development.
A foundational Technology Law course can examine:
• the social and human effects of technological systems;
• privacy, surveillance, cybersecurity, platforms, and data governance;
• algorithmic discrimination and unequal distributions of technological risk;
• the interaction between innovation and corporate power;
• technological dependence and infrastructures;
• the effects of technology on democratic institutions and professional responsibility;
• the difference between technical efficiency and normative legitimacy; and
• the capacity of technology to produce both significant benefits and serious harms.
Such a course can teach students that AI output must be treated much as a supervising attorney would treat work received from a research assistant or junior associate. The work may be useful, sophisticated, and efficient, but the lawyer remains responsible for verifying every authority, proposition, citation, and analytical step.
The danger is not limited to fabricated cases or obvious “hallucinations.” AI may also generate an answer that is technically accurate but incomplete, insufficiently contextualized, based on the wrong legal framework, or irrelevant to the specific problem. These errors are particularly difficult for students to detect because they may not yet possess the expertise necessary to recognize what has been omitted.
Legal education must therefore help students develop the substantive knowledge required to challenge AI output rather than accept it passively.
Comparative law as a response to technological change
The conversation about AI also demonstrated why comparative legal education remains indispensable.
Artificial intelligence does not enter every legal system in the same way. Its use is shaped by differences in legal sources, professional traditions, judicial practices, regulatory institutions, legal education, and the relative roles of codes, cases, administrative authorities, and private actors.
The risks associated with AI-assisted legal research may therefore manifest differently across common-law, civil-law, mixed, Indigenous, and plural legal orders. A tool trained primarily on one legal culture may reproduce misconceptions about another. It may treat case law as authoritative in a jurisdiction where judicial decisions play a different role, misinterpret codified rules through a common-law framework, or flatten institutional and cultural differences into generalized legal propositions.
Comparative methodology can help expose these assumptions.
It teaches students and scholars to ask not only whether an AI-generated proposition is correct, but correct within which legal system, institutional setting, hierarchy of authority, professional culture, and historical context.
The same comparative perspective is necessary when considering how different jurisdictions regulate AI, allocate responsibility, define professional competence, protect personal data, and balance innovation against social risk. The emerging governance of AI is itself becoming an important laboratory for comparative law.
Legal education as translation
More broadly, teaching comparative law requires legal educators to act as translators among legal traditions, disciplines, professional expectations, and different forms of knowledge.
Students enter law school with very different educational and cultural backgrounds. Some may possess substantial historical knowledge but limited familiarity with science or technology. Others may come from engineering, economics, business, public policy, or the natural sciences but have encountered relatively little legal history or political theory.
The objective should not be to assume a single shared intellectual background. Nor should it be to abandon historical and contextual knowledge simply because students may initially find it unfamiliar.
Instead, legal education should create pathways through which students can connect new ideas to what they already know while progressively developing a broader framework. Comparative teaching is particularly valuable in this respect because it makes visible the historical contingency of legal institutions and demonstrates that different societies may respond to similar problems through different configurations of law, authority, community, and individual rights.
Students must understand not only the content of legal rules but also why those rules matter, how they emerged, what purposes they serve, and how lawyers may use comparative insights in practice.
Looking forward
The discussion confirmed that comparative law remains essential precisely because the world is becoming more legally, institutionally, and technologically complex.
An increasingly multipolar international order requires comparative lawyers to look beyond traditional West-to-East narratives of legal diffusion. Artificial intelligence requires legal educators to reconsider how learning, authorship, expertise, and assessment are evaluated. The growing diversity of student backgrounds requires teaching methods that connect doctrine with history, culture, institutions, technology, and practice.
Taken together, these developments invite a richer conception of comparative law: not simply as the comparison of national rules, but as the study of how societies create knowledge, distribute authority, select institutions, regulate technological change, and imagine legitimate forms of governance.
I am grateful to the organizers and colleagues for a stimulating and wide-ranging discussion and for the opportunity to exchange ideas about how comparative law and legal education can continue to evolve in response to an increasingly interconnected, multipolar, and technologically mediated world.
Comparative law connects legal systems—but it also helps us understand the choices, assumptions, and forms of knowledge through which legal systems are constructed.
Paolo Davide Farah, Paolo Farah