Transplants, Legal Exports As

The term legal transplant refers to the domestic adoption by a state or community of a legal norm taken from elsewhere. Alan Watson popularized the term in 1974 in a book that used transplants as a tool for understanding legal history and described transplants historically as the principal source of legal change. However, the transplant process also has many contemporary implications and variants. The story of the movement of law from colonizing countries to their colonies and its continuing consequences is that of a legal transplant, as is the process through which international development agencies seek to encourage particular legal structures in developing countries. Likewise, legal transplants result from the normative demands of globalization, with international markets insisting on standard norms or harmonization.

In recent decades, ...