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Abstract Although they belong to different academic disciplines, anthropology and comparative law share a crucially important feature: comparison. They both focus on the study of the Other, so as to better understand the Self. The basic reason for which comparison is significant is: all individual life and human activity are a process of experience and trial and error; in order for the individual and ethnic group to survive and develop, we must pay attention to and study the Other, learning its experiences and avoiding its missteps. With respect to law, the legal systems, organizations, behaviors and notions of different ethnic groups depend primarily on and reflect such groups' experience, trial and error. In this regard, comparative law can enable us to learn lessons from other groups' experience, trial and error, remedy our own shortcomings, and thus benefit the progression of human activity from practical rationality to rational practice. Such an emphasis on practical rationality and rational practice coincides with such mainstream American schools of thought as pragmatism, as represented by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. In the field of comparative law, because of its focus on specific matters, comparison within the branches of law best reflects the important transition from practical rationality to rational practice, and is thus in urgent need of establishment and reinforcement, so as to substantially help establish the rule of law. This paper then focuses on explaining the trend of development of China's practice of rule of law, namely, its transition from practical rationality to rational practice, and points out that an emphasis on practice is not only in accord with the gist of Marxist philosophy, but also agrees with China's long-standing cultural tradition. Members of the newly-emergent China Rule of Law School of Practice have devoted crucial attention to and/or participated actively in China's practice of rule of law. Aspiring to find an ideal road for China to realize the rule of law, this School has been focusing on China's practice of rule of law, with such methods as experiment and empirical research. With such characteristics, this School is in obvious agreement with American pragmatism, and therefore should pay close attention to and learn from the latter during its process of development and maturation. Such key words in this paper, including practical rationality and rational practice, should also become key notions of this School. As an academic community that wishes to make a genuine contribution to China's legal development, the major historical responsibility of this School should be to rationalize China's practice of rule of law. This will require this School to place greater emphasis on developing practical rationality and on decreasing or even eliminating blind, meaningless trial and error through induction, summary and design (including top-level design as well as comparison with the rule of law practice and theory of other countries or regions).
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