Perhaps the most economically relevant example of such a transplant is the laws of a country, particularly its commercial laws. Countries colonized by the United Kingdom generally have laws heavily influenced by those of England; The countries colonized by France, Spain and Portugal have laws influenced by their respective colonizers. Spain and Portugal themselves have laws heavily influenced by those of France, which they inherited from the Napoleonic conquest. Sometimes such legal transplantation takes the simple form of copying laws; In other cases, the influence is less direct, motivated by the linguistic community and the training of lawyers and politicians, which often took place in the colonizing country or in the universities it established in its colonies. Essays in Roman law, with an emphasis on private law. Some essays deal with the creation of law, the study of aspects of sources, legal change, legal culture, law and society, others deal with very ancient law or the origins of legal ideas, and some of them are as philological as they are legal. Civil law, on the other hand, has its roots in Roman law, was first absorbed by the Napoleonic Codes and then by the Austrian and Russian Civil Code, and was later introduced mainly through colonization and occupation in continental Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Indochina. Instead, Bulgaria, Ethiopia, Iran and Kazakhstan deliberately borrowed their original legal systems from France, Russia or England. Colonization created “legal families” of laws that were greatly influenced by the countries of origin. This article, from a Vox eBook, explains how these legal families often have substantially different legal rules and approaches that then have a significant impact on economic outcomes.
An essential feature of legal transplantation that makes it useful in studying the impact of laws on economic outcomes is that, like conquest and colonization itself, it is largely involuntary. Although in a few cases, such as Russia in the 19th century or Japan after the Meiji Restoration, a country lends purely voluntary trade laws, in most cases, such as those described above, transplantation is either forced or a byproduct of forced political change. Therefore, it can be considered largely exogenous and its economic and social consequences studied. We also examined whether the procedural and organizational differences between legal systems highlighted by legal scholars can be quantified. We found that courts in common law countries tend to be more independent of the executive branch than courts in civil law countries, with longer judicial terms and stricter limits on the removal of judges (La Porta et al. 2004). The common law process is also less formal, with fewer written or formal steps required to advance disputes, fewer filings, and more limited appeal opportunities. Moreover, these procedural differences lead to substantial results: when other things are identical, it usually takes longer and costs more to evict a non-paying tenant or to collect a rejected cheque in a civil country than in a common law country (Djankov et al. 2003). The quantitative evidence is broadly consistent with the broad perspective of comparative law. Operationally, researchers of “legal origins” assigned the majority of countries in the world to English common law, French civil law or one of the German, Scandinavian and socialist legal traditions, and then calculated correlations between these dummies and approximations of legal origins for the economic outcomes mentioned above.
[1] Scholars of “legal origins” suggest that the common law has at least two favourable consequences. First, historical events in England and France have placed greater emphasis on judicial independence, private order and human capital. Second, the law created by judges would make the common law more adaptable to the contractual needs of businesses. [1] The main institution that distinguishes the two legal traditions is the legislative institution, which determines the identity of the legislature. [5] The common law is based on jurisprudence that precedents created by appellate courts guide subsequent decisions of equal or lower courts and can only be changed by appellate judges with costly justification. [4] Rather, civil law is based on written law, which includes laws promulgated by political representatives. [5] Since the writing of these articles, a significant literature has reviewed these results. Some of our investor protection measures have been rightly criticized, revised and expanded (e.g.
La Porta et al. 2006, Djankov et al. 2008). The question has been raised as to whether the financial development models we have identified have also existed historically, and the best available evidence suggests that this is the case (Hildebrand 2016). Some scholars have argued that our legal origins are merely substitutes for politics, with civil law representing social democracy. In the data, the models we describe apply to both dictatorships and democracies and reject this political interpretation (La Porta et al. 2008). This analysis of medieval European history has been criticized by Daniel Klerman and Paul Mahoney, who conclude that a system of justice by lay jurors in England was first favored because of low literacy rates and later applied to place the judiciary in the hands of the crown.
They argue that both French and English judges had de facto power to legislate through precedent and that French judges enjoyed greater independence because their office could be inherited as property. Therefore, the only lasting divergence between the legal systems in England and France arose from the different fates of the judiciary after their respective revolutions. [7] While English common law originated in England in the thirteenth century and was later transplanted through colonization and occupation to the former colonies of England (United States, Canada, Australia and several countries in Central America, Africa and Asia), Scandinavian common law was developed in Denmark and Sweden, and German common law originated in Germany and Switzerland. These last four countries then exported their common law model to their respective colonies or jurisdictions (China, Greece, Japan, Romania, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Turkey) which were never colonized, but borrowed their original legal order from European codes, considered the most advanced at the time.