Opening Remarks

• Author: Olivier Moréteau
• Pages: 1015-1019

Professor of Law, Russell B. Long Eminent Scholars Academic Chair, Director of the Center of Civil Law Studies, Paul M. Hebert Law Center, Louisiana State University; Directeur honoraire de l'Institut de Droit ComparÈ Edouard Lambert, UniversitÈ Jean Moulin, Lyon, France.

Nearly ten top comparative law scholars from Canada, the United States, and various European countries gathered at the Paul M. Hebert Law Center of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in late January 2007, to try to answer the following question: How far does globalization affect law making? Every contributor to the present volume has had a different experience, sometimes as law maker. Each of them comes from the Western world, with the noticeable exception of our African-European colleague Jacques Vanderlinden. One may comment that this provided only one side of the story, which is largely true, but this was a first-a modest attempt to address a fundamental question, with the hope that larger, more diverse projects would follow.

Some six months after my appointment to the newly created Russell Long Chair of Excellence, my new colleagues Jim Bowers and Bill Corbett suggested that I may help the Louisiana Law Review in putting together an international symposium addressing some of the hot subjects debated in comparative law. I agreed to meet with Katie Grissel, in charge of the symposium project for 2007, and I must say that I understood immediately that she was the most suitable person for such a very ambitious project that would leave a mark in the history of the LSU Law Center (particularly its Center of Civil Law Studies) and that of the Louisiana Law Review. My task in the present project was limited. I had to find a topic, identify and contact the suitable speakers, and, later on, plan the sequence of presentations and discussions. Everything else, from the practical organization of the symposium to the publication of this rich issue, is the work of an efficient team of editors, with the very receptive administrative help of Vickie Landry.

We needed a theme, and I did not have too much time to think of one. I tried to find a not too technical topic (it would then be difficult to identify the most suitable specialists, thus reducing the pool in an existing contact list) and yet a topic of interest, a broad one where anyone I might contact would have something to say. If the topic were at the cutting edge, all the better. If it were controversial, we could have rich debates.

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How could I think of law making in such a context? This is an antiquated, all too often visited and revisited subject. And yet, many changes that take place in our world are affecting the way we create the...