Legal transplant

The term legal transplant was coined in the 1970s by the Scottish-American legal
scholar W.A.J. 'Alan' Watson to indicate the moving of a rule or a system of law from
one country to another (A. Watson, Legal Transplants: An Approach to Comparative
Law, Edinburgh, 1974). The notion of legal transplantation is diffusionism-based and
according to this concept most changes in most legal systems occur as the result of
borrowing. As maintained by Watson, transplantation is the most fertile source of legal
development.
Laws are commonly inspired by foreign policies and experiences. Regardless of the
academic discourses on whether legal transplants are sustainable as a notion in the legal
theory, they are common practice. Nevertheless, the degree to which new laws are
inspired by foreign examples can vary. A frequent and often justified criticism is that
imported laws are not suited for a certain local context.
German jurist Friedrich Carl von Savigny and his historical school of jurisprudence,
which was inspired by the 19th-century Romanticism, have notably promoted the
origins of the German people and their distinctive ethos, or Volksgeist (the spirit of a
people). Savignys school of legal thought expressed the need of legal change to
respect the continuity of the Volksgeist offering a pre-Darwinian concept of juristic
evolution. However, this concept of juristic evolution did not leave much space for
notions such as legal transplants and the diffusion of law. More recently, Pierre Legrand
is one of the strongest opponents of legal transplants.
Today, legal transplants are often mentioned in the broader process of diffusion of law
or legal acculturation. J.W. Powell is credited with coining the word acculturation,
first using it in an 1880 report by the US Bureau of American Ethnography. He
explained that this term refers to the psychological changes induced by cross-cultural
imitation. In a broader context, such notion is by many contemporary scholars applied
to legal thought. The diffusion of law is a process of legal change in todays age of
globalization. Studies on diffusion of law are notably a new area of research in the 21st
century.