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Acknowledgements
Every comparativist is, to some degree, an autodidact. As jurists trained in one system, intellectual curiosity or professional necessity (or both) at some point compels us, for myriad reasons, to cast our gaze upon a foreign system of laws. On numerous occasions throughout my career as a military lawyer—which has placed me at various times in Europe and the Middle East—I have been called upon to quickly attain some understanding of another country's legal system and, based on that understanding, render advice or take action. At such moments, I have been most grateful to the jurists before me who took the time to sit down, set pen to paper, and assiduously detail the legal system in question—splaying out its underlying theories, explaining the structure, and illuminating the legal landscape. It is only through such efforts that the rest of us may rise to become comparativists in our own right. Likewise, in writing this book, I have heavily relied on the works of others who have performed the public service of explicating the legal systems relevant to this study. To each of them, I owe a debt of sincere gratitude.