Impact of Legal Culture and Legal Transplants on the Evolution of the U.S. Legal System

Abstract

In this U.S. National Report to the 2010 International Congress of Comparative Law Program on the Impact of Legal Culture and Legal Transplants, we respond to the profound and pertinent questions asked by our distinguished general reporter, Professor Jorge Sanchez Cordero. We first address the U.S. experience with legal transplants at critical times in the evolution of its legal system in the seventeenth and eighteenth century colonial and post revolutionary war eras, followed by the nineteenth and twentieth century development of the national marketplace and the post-World War II globalization high tech electronic era. We then, in particular, address the matrimonial law of the community property regime of Texas and Louisiana, within the political, social, philosophical, and linguistic contexts of those states.