Land-Law Reforms in Vietnam and Myanmar: “Legal Transplant” Viewed from Asian Recipients

Abstract This paper focuses on the conflict of norms in the interface between the “transplanted” formal law and the local social norms in the land-law reforms in Vietnam and Myanmar, each representing different legal families, while sharing commonness in that both have attempted law-making in the post-colonial independence period in order to restore the basis of the livelihoods of the local population. Both of the legal concepts of “land-use right” (quyen su dung dat) in Vietnam and “land-use right for cultivation” (loat paing kwint) in Myanmar have been the product of law-makers’ restorative attempts at farmland security, while intentionally avoiding usage of the term “ownership” that would result in the capitalist transaction of land as a commodity. However, the contemporary land-law reforms led by donor-oriented “legal transplant” in these countries have resulted in the plunder of such policy, by reintroducing the same mechanisms of land exploitation as existed in the colonial days. Roaring protests of the local agricultural population seem to be a rising-up of the social norm descended from the immemorial past as an unwritten Constitution to bring an end to the centuries-long movement of “legal transplant” of the modern capitalist law.