ABSTRACT
“Legal transplants”, or the borrowing of legal ideas and solutions from other jurisdictions, are a long-established use of comparative law as a law reform technique. Legal transplants are, however, controversial and problematic where the borrowed laws of the “transplantor” jurisdiction are insufficiently adapted to the human and environmental contexts of the “transplantee” jurisdiction. Incorporating legal geography into comparative law methodology brings a critical perspective to the ways in which place-specific extra-legal factors complicate law reform proposals based on legal transplants. A search of the literature of both comparative law and legal geography returned only one piece of work proposing a fusion of the two – Kedar’s argument for “critical comparative legal geography”. Kedar argues that whilst comparative law has not engaged with legal geography, conversely legal geography has also not engaged in “sustained comparative research” and, accordingly, that both disciplines stand to benefit from each other’s insights. This chapter builds on Kedar’s proposal for a new hybrid methodology and considers how comparative legal geography can contribute critical depth to investigations of human and environmental contexts – the nuances of “place” – as extra-legal factors in legal transplants.
