Legal transplants and parliaments

The essays in this volume span a broad array of geographic conditions, historical experiences, and legal systems. Each offers valuable insights in its own right, but collectively they take useful positions on the theory and practice of borrowing legal ideas, with a special emphasis on the role of the legislature. Each essay presents a view on how legal transplantation and synthesis happens-in the moment of constitutional creation or as an ongoing exercise in regular lawmaking-and whether it is a coherent and valuable practice. The essays in this volume suggest that culture and institutions stand in a dialectical relationship: informality can yield relatively informed, robust choices to borrow legal ideas where an encouraging culture exists. Where cultural resistance to borrowing prevails, increased formality may be the best antidote to surreptitious or poorly considered efforts at ideological takings