Definition
The term “Legal transplants” is commonly used to designate the dissemination of legal models from an exporting legal order to a receiving one.
In a wider perspective, reception, transplants, or borrowings may either refer to the process, or to the results of a project of legal reforms, which is in turn initiated by a plan of legal change based upon an imitation of laws, doctrines and theories, and judicial decisions, already in place in different legal orders.
Within the fabric of such terminology, the notion of legal transplants has been, for the last four decades, most central. This is also due to a successful and widely discussed book by the legal historian Alan Watson (1974), which is devoted to a specific set of borrowings within the realm of private law. While the success of Watson’s study emerged from the plain recognition that borrowing is usually the driving factor in legal change, reasons for dissent, repeatedly manifested, among others, by Pierre Legrand, were...
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Further Reading
Ajani G (2007) Legal change and institutional reforms. In: Ret tog tolerance. Festkrift til Helge Johan Thue. Glydendal Norsk Forlag, Oslo, pp 473–497
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Ajani, G. (2019). Legal Transplants. In: Marciano, A., Ramello, G.B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Law and Economics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7753-2_731
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