Interpreting Legal Transfers: The Implications for Law and Development

Over recent years, the global diffusion of legal and regulatory regimes has dramatically increased. Much of the increase is the direct result of initiatives funded in the name of ‘law and development’. The world over, domestic legislation and regulatory reforms borrow heavily from international and foreign legal systems, and legal transfers have become the main inspiration for change. And yet after decades (if not centuries, if the colonial projects are included) of law reform projects, there is mixed evidence that legal transfers induce recipients to change in the ways envisaged by legal donors. Much has been written about the failures of law reform by law and development, comparative law and regulatory perspectives. This chapter is the introduction to an edited book titled 'Law and Development and the Global Discourses of Legal Transfers', to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. The book is significant because it brings together leading scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to assess the strengths and weaknesses of these different disciplinary approaches. It aims to demonstrate how a synthesis of law and development, regulatory theory and legal transplantation theory – disciplines which have, to date, remained intellectually isolated from each other – can produce a more nuanced understanding about the types of legal transfers that are most likely to succeed.