Adapting Legal Cultures

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This collection looks at the theory and practice of legal borrowing and adaptation in different areas of the world: Europe, the USA and Latin America, South East Asia and Japan. Many of the contributors focus on fundamental theoretical issues. What are legal transplants What is the role of the state in producing socio-legal change What are the conditions of successful legal transfers How is globalization changing these conditions Such problems are also discussed with reference to substantive and specific case studies. When and why did Japanese rules of product liability come into line with those of the EU and the USA How and why did judicial review come late to the legal system in the Netherlands and Scandinavia The chapters in this volume, which include a comprehensive theoretical introduction, offer a range of valuable insights even if they also show that the "state of art" in the study of legal transfers is disputed and far from settled.

Reviews

...brings to the forefront critical debates that demand attention in any serious comparative endeavour. -- Fiona Haines, University of Melbourne * The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, Vol. 38, No. 1 *
The collection of essays by Nelken and Feest makes an important contribution to both comparative law and legal sociology particularly because it does not confine itself to the classical legal systems which many comparative lawyers (like myself) have studied, and because it endeavours to create a dialogue between comparative lawyers and legal sociologists in terms of both theory and the analysis of particular legal developments. A combination of the two fields of legal scholarship presents a significant dimension to contemporary comparative law, and this collection will be a major point of reference in both fields. In the end, this book marks an important step in developing an agenda for comparative law in our contemporary world. -- John Bell * International and Comparative Law Quarterly *
The chapters in this volume offer a range of valuable insights -- Book Review Editor * Tilburg Foreign Law Review *

Author Bio

David Nelken is Professor of Law at the University of Macerata in Italy. Johannes Feest is Professor of Law at the University of Bremen.