The Politics and Incentives of Legal Transplantation

The last ten years have seen an exponential increase in the volume of legal transplantation, the process by which laws and legal institutions developed in one country are then adopted by another. Although there is a small literature on the process of legal transplantation, most of that literature presumes that the expected efficacy of the law is the predominant factor in determining which laws are transplanted, from where, and to where. This exploratory paper ventures a series of quite different hypotheses, all premised on the view that donor countries, recipient countries, and third parties (such as NGOs) have political, economic, and reputational incentives that are likely to be important factors in determining the patterns of legal transplants. The paper offers a number of hypotheses about these possible efficacy-independent factors, gives examples to support the possibility that the hypotheses might be sound, and suggests ways in which the hypotheses might be tested in a more systematic way.