Legal Transplants, Legal Survivals, and Legal Revivals: Towards a Reconceptualisation of The Circulation of Legal Forms in Time and Space by Rafał Mańko

“…However, his notion of a legal transplant conflates two quite different realities: on the one hand, the borrowing of legal forms from other, simultaneously existing legal systems (such as the transplant of the Swiss Civil Code to Atatürk’s Turkey) and, on the other hand, the rediscovery of old legal forms and their “borrowing” from long defunct legal systems (such as the rediscovery of Justinian’s Corpus Iuris Civilis by medieval lawyers in Western Europe, and the infusion of Roman ideas about contract law into existing customary rules). Although there are certain formal similarities between the two phenomena, this article will argue that they should not be conflated, especially given the sharp socio-legal difference between borrowing from a living legal system (with a functioning judiciary and legal academia) and the cultural appropriation of historical legal material for contemporary legal purposes. …”
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