Some challenges of legal globalization closely resemble those formulated earlier for legal pluralism: the irreducible plurality of legal orders, the coexistence of domestic state law with other legal orders, the absence of a hierarchically superior position transcending the differences. This review discusses how legal pluralism engages with legal globalization and how legal globalization utilizes legal pluralism. It demonstrates how several international legal disciplines-comparative law, conflict of laws, public international law, and European Union law-have slowly begun to adopt some ideas of legal pluralism. It shows how traditional themes and questions of legal pluralism-the definition of law, the role of the state, of community, and of space-are altered under conditions of globalization. It addresses interrelations between different legal orders and various ways, both theoretical and practical, to deal with them. And it provides an outlook on the future of global legal pluralism as theory and practice of global law.

The functional method has become the mantra of comparative law. For its proponents it is the most, perhaps the only, fruitful method; to its opponents, it represents everything bad about mainstream comparative law. This article tries to reconstruct and evaluate functionalist comparative law by placing it within the larger framework of other disciplines, especially the social sciences. Such an interdisciplinary analysis yields three promises. First, the interdisciplinary look should enable a construction of a more theoretically grounded functional method of comparative law than is usually presented. Second, the interdisciplinary approach should help formulate and evaluate the concept in order to determine how functional the method really is. Third, comparison with functionalism in other disciplines may reveal what is special about functionalism in comparative law, and why some things about other disciplines would rightly be regarded as methodological shortcomings may in fact be fruitful for comparative law.

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