Impact of Legal Culture and Legal Transplants on the Evolution of the U.S. Legal System

Abstract:     
This article is based on the United States National Report to the 2010 International Congress of Comparative Law on Legal History and Ethnology: Legal Culture and Legal Transplant. It traces the United States experience in acceptance of legal transplants at critical times in the evolution of its legal systems. It addresses the transplantation of English common law to the United States in the colonial and post-revolutionary war eras, noting the limited impact of the French civil code tradition. It next discusses development of the national market place, evolution of uniform state laws and in more recent times the transplantation of supranational norms via the Supremacy and Treaty clauses of the United States Constitution into the United States legal system. It then analyzes the matrimonial law of the community property regime of Texas and Louisiana within the political, social, human, philosophical and linguistic context of these States.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 27

working papers series