Overview

Fifty years after Alan Watson's Legal Transplants: An Approach to Comparative Law, the concept of legal transplants remains central to comparative legal scholarship. Over time, the literature has expanded to explore how laws are drafted, interpreted, and understood across jurisdictions-revealing legal transplants as a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. This book offers a nuanced and balanced analysis of the evolution of legal transplants, engaging with both foundational texts and recent developments. It goes beyond traditional legal discourse to incorporate insights from other disciplines, including policy studies, cultural transfer, entangled history, and the diffusion of ideas. By doing so, it broadens the scope of the debate and encourages a more interdisciplinary approach to understanding how legal norms travel and take root. Importantly, the book makes a strong case for the continued relevance and effectiveness of legal transplants in modern lawmaking. While acknowledging valid criticisms, it challenges the notion that such concerns should lead to legal isolationism. Instead, it argues that legal transplants are not only common but often successful-and should remain a key tool for lawmakers seeking to innovate and reform.

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9780198884125

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Mathias Siems is Professor of Private Law and Market Regulation at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy. He previously taught at Durham University, the University of East Anglia, the University of Edinburgh and the Riga Graduate School of Law. He was also a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard Law School and a Jean Monnet Fellow at the EUI. He is a graduate of the universities of Munich, London, and Edinburgh.

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