The Market and the Family, the Sacred and the Secular in Modern Comparative law Veronica Corcodel 7(1) Jindal Global Law Review 9 (2016) Abstract This paper explores the operation of the distinctions between the market and the family, the sacred and the secular in Euro-American comparative legal scholarship. It contributes to existing debates by exploring the potential of the lenses of inclusion and exclusion to address the political implications of the two dichotomies. Starting from the observation that the two distinctions are often inseparable, since market law is constituted in opposition to religious family law, it puts emphasis on the ways in which the exclusionary dimension of such construction is produced. It also shows that exclusion stands in tension with comparative law’s own promise of inclusion. In this sense, the field is reducible neither to inclusion nor to exclusion, and yet it contains both. Capturing this ambivalence in the works of some of the most important Euro-American comparatists, the paper concludes with some tentative thoughts on a critical praxis of particularism. This paper explores the operation of the distinctions between the market and the family, the sacred and the secular in the scholarship of some of the most important Euro-American legal comparatists. These distinctions have become ingrained in modern legal thinking, often under a vocabulary that conceals their political implications. Some critical voices sought to destabilize the dominant ways in which these divides animate contemporary legal imagination. 1 This paper joins such efforts by emphasizing the operation of the two distinctions in modern comparative law from a postcolonial perspective. In line with these critical thinkers, the construction of the “sacred” or the “traditional” family is seen here as an intrinsic element to the rise of the law of the market. In this sense, as it will be shown, the 1 See e.g. Janet Halley & Kerry Rittich, Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law: Genealogies and Contemporary Studies of Family Law Exceptionalism, 58 American Journal of Comparative Law 753 (2010) [Hereinafter Halley & Rittich, Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law]; Duncan Kennedy, Savigny’s Family/Patrimony Distinction and its Place in the Global Genealogy of Classical Legal Thought, 58 American Journal of Comparative Law 811 (2010), Lama Abu-Odeh, The Politics of (Mis)Recognition: Islamic Law Pedagogy in American Academia, 52 The American Journal of Comparative Law 789 (2004); Fernanda Nicola, Family Law Exceptionalism in Comparative Law, 58 American Journal of Comparative Law 777 (2011) [Hereinafter Nicola, Family Law Exceptionalism].