Comparative legal geography : context and place in "legal transplants"

Legal transplants, or law reform via the borrowing of legal ideas from another jurisdiction, are an established method in comparative law. In response to a problem identified in the home jurisdiction, lawmakers may seek possible law reform solutions by looking at what other jurisdictions do in response to that problem, with a view to importing the foreign solution (Danneman 2008, p.400). This chapter considers what legal geography has to offer in mitigating a problem with legal transplants as a method of law reform. The borrowed laws of the "transplantor" jurisdiction may be insufficiently adapted to the human and environmental contexts of the "transplantee" juriscition" there may be a poor "'fit' between the transferred law and the local context" (Graziadei 2008, p.472). This chapter proposes incorporating legal geography into comparative law methodology, as a means to bring a critical perspective to the ways in which social and environmental context complicates law reform proposals based on legal transplants.