The Weak Law

Abstract

In the last decade the subject of »legal transplants« has been taken over by practical »western« lawyers mainly involved in projects of »exporting« their own legal systems. What this article contends is that rules are not self-expressive; institutions need to communicate, and so the law is, in a way, wrapped in a narrative. The present article focuses on these aspects because of the problems raised by the process of commodification of legal rules, as is suggested by the words import and export of legal models, especially in relation to former Socialist countries. The author maintains that the process of importing and exporting rules and institutions is an almost unconscious process of integrating them into the ideology of the borrowing system. Thus the meaning of the borrowed institutions depends solely on the struggle among the formative elements in the receiving system, which almost always will produce something different from the original. But the author also believes that the ideology of a system is very often not merely a local product but a contamination of several local traits by foreign ones. In more general terms, the actual legal world is more a »world of contaminations« than a world split into different families.

Keywords

• MPIeR