Legal Norms' Distinctiveness in Legal Transplants and Global Legal Pluralism

Abstract

This paper examines the transnational movement of law and legal pluralism in the transnational domain in order to play with a specific question: whether legal norms are distinctive or whether there is a distinctive way that legal norms operate in practice. The paper engages with the International and considers two empirical domains or sets of disciplines: Legal Transplants and Global Legal Pluralism. Both reflect on the relationships between multiple overlapping legal orders and between donors and recipients in interactional legal practices. These disciplines point to moments of problem-articulation, periods of translation, and practices of acceptance and recognition. The paper suggests preliminary conclusions about the distinctiveness of legal norms, specifically that there is an aesthetic to law reform or legal instrumentalism and to a practice of recognition between overlapping normative options, both of which generate a particular kind of fidelity to law and legal norms.