Contemporary thinking about the role of method in comparative legal scholarship often seems trapped between two kinds of exhortations which, while both containing some measure of truth, are both also unfortunately to some extent unproductive. On one side lie complaints that ‘attempts to develop even a moderately sophisticated method of comparison’ are ‘exceedingly rare’ in comparative legal studies, with many projects apparently simply adopting an ‘anything goes’ attitude to methodological questions. On the other side, however, one finds disheartening warnings that comparison, if it is to be done well, may be so difficult as to border on the impossible. Comparatists, it seems, are told to aim higher and to despair – to try much harder, and to not even bother. This volume is the result of a collective attempt to recapture what might be called the ‘missing middle’ in methodological thinking in comparative legal scholarship. It stems from the conviction that the sheer volume of rigorous, interesting and exciting comparative scholarship produced over the past decades indicates that neither of these two assessments of the state of the discipline can be telling the whole story. But it is also born of a sense of unease with an area of scholarship in which much of the most influential work on method remains at the level of pure theory, omitting any sustained testing of its critiques and recommendations in practice, while at the same time much interesting ‘substantive’ comparative work does not make its methodological choices sufficiently clear.