The Notion of Legal Transplants Beyond the Anglosphere: Decentring the Debate

Abstract

Legal transplants are key to understanding the evolution of law in a global context. Current debates on this topic focus predominantly on publications in English. By contrast, this article explores how scholars in French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Turkish language publications have discussed the idea of legal transplants. It identifies alternative terms used in these languages and examines how debates on legal transplants vary across different countries, considering historical, doctrinal, theoretical and critical perspectives. The analysis reveals that each country's legal history results in diverse approaches to legal transplants, in particular each country's role as a donor or recipient. While acknowledging some influence of Anglophone scholarship, this research thus emphasises home-grown discussions predating this literature and highlights the absence of a fully integrated transnational legal discourse. Moreover, the article advocates for a normative shift towards a more critical and cosmopolitan evaluation of legal transplants, also paying closer attention to their design ex-ante.

Keywords: legal transplants, reception, legal discourse, law and language, legal history