Suchergebnisse

There is a shift taking place in the fight against corruption. Increasingly attention is turning to the role of the private actor.2 This can be characterized as a shift from a public approach that sees the state and government as the primary driving force in the fight against corruption to an approach that sees private processes and actors playing an equally important role. This begs the question: what is a private approach? What is its motivation, content, or method? How does a private approach interrelate with the public approach? This book on private remedies for corruption is a response to these questions from the perspective of private law.3 This chapter introduces the research question, the research method and the relevance of this research.

This paper motivates the choice of the functional comparative method to research the issue of civil remedies for international corruption. It shows how the social, economic and political factors that have shaped the normative context of the research question point to the functional comparative method as an appropriate methodology. The paper suggests that this method of legal research is able to meet the challenges inherent in the cross-cultural analysis required in the case of issues with an international dimension. The paper also argues that the use of the functional comparative method provides a perspective on the larger issue of rule making in a globalised world, by providing an element of predictability in the search for 'common rules' of interaction. Furthermore, the functional comparison of responses of legal systems to the question of civil remedies for international corruption provides a window on the possibilities that exist for legal reform and development.