Frankenberg has offered an erudite, critical, humorous, and often sly account of comparative law and its politicized discourses. It is both, as its title indicates, comparative law as critique and equally a critique of comparative law. The assessment of his critique offers some alternative perspectives while endorsing his project and admiring his achievement.

As Europe forges its legal order, constitution, and self-understanding, many appear to believe that identifying and enacting laws and a legal framework that correspond to shared concepts of justice and human rights will solve the problem of legalized barbarism which once plagued Europe and which has been a recurrent feature throughout time and across the globe. The historical propensity of courts, even in democratic states, to legitimate and enable policies of persecution and discrimination provides compelling evidence that the current level of faith in law is misplaced.

In Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., the Supreme Court held that “the presumption against extraterritoriality applies to claims under the [Alien Tort Statute (ATS)], and that nothing in the statute rebuts that presumption.” The Court preserved the possibility that claims arising from conduct outside the United States might be actionable under the ATS “where the claims touch and concern the territory of the United States ... with sufficient force to displace the presumption against extraterritorial application.” However, the Court’s decision apparently sounds the death knell for “foreign-cubed” human rights claims under the ATS—that is, cases in which foreign defendants committed human rights abuses against foreign plaintiffs in foreign countries.