Comparing legal transfers

This chapter explores the theory and practice of legal transfers, highlights mainstream and critical comparative approaches, and discusses the complexity in decontextualizing legal ideas. It provides an overview of these methods and a discussion through the theory of legal transfers, including formalist tendencies, functionalist bias, and IKEA-style globalization. The chapter sheds light on four phases of legal transfer and its results, including resistance, proliferation, idiosyncrasy, and political deviance. With legal information transfer following different pathways, the process of decontextualizing legal ideas for their “trading” on global and regional markets is analysed. The chapter is grounded in a practical example, the right to bear arms, and uses a critical approach to identify historical, cultural, and political nuances that confront the conventional narrative that disfavors legal transfers from the Global South. The practice of comparative law collectively retrieves, encodes, and stores legal knowledge bringing unfamiliar items, for deciphering not devouring, to light to create a “transactive collective memory” of the world of law.