Argonauts of the Eastern Mediterranean: Legal Transplants and Signaling

Likhovski, Assaf

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1098179

“…Emulation and mimicry have also been suggested as sociolegal explanations of legal transplantation (Schauer 2000;Twining 2004;Blum 2008;Likhovski 2009). Countries often mimic practices of nations they admire or with whom they wish to identify; in a colonial context, colonies and former colonies emulate the law of the metropole, as an expression of identity-national, professional, and cultural (Bhabha 1997;Schauer 2000, 258-63;Blum 2008).…”

Section: Mimetic Convergencementioning

confidence: 99%

Self-Proclaimed Human Rights Heroes: The Professional Project of Israeli Military Judges

Ben‐Natan¹

2021

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article explores the cooptation of human rights discourse by looking into how Israeli military judges in the Occupied Palestinian Territories use human rights as professional capital. Previous research into human rights arguments legitimizing the Israeli occupation remained confined to a unitary image of the state. Here, I dissect the separate professional project of military judges. Optimizing a self-congratulatory argument, judges portray themselves as human rights heroes of Palestinians. But while independent judicial activism would criticize human rights violations by the state, military judges use human rights as synonymous with legal professionalism, while avoiding criticism and sidestepping human rights’ challenge to state power. Using a multimethod approach including analysis of judicial decisions, academic articles by military judges, and in-depth interviews, I argue that between 2000 and 2010, Israeli military judges were responding to a professional legitimacy crisis by what I call mimetic convergence. Relying on new institutionalism and postcolonial theory, mimetic convergence produces belonging and mobility for a professional subgroup that experiences alienation in the “colony” through convergence with the specific characteristics of the legal community of the “metropole.” Mimicking the state instead of criticizing it permits the two projects— promoting military judges professionally and legitimizing the state’s colonial occupation—to coalesce.

show abstract

“…The bargaining process would be further facilitated by the fact that those socialized decision makers no longer perceive the costs of the transplanted rule and do not therefore insist on receiving compensation for their adoption. Likewise, socialization can reduce barriers to regulatory competition as socialized decision makers desiring to extract material or reputational gains at the international level may seek to transplant an even greater number of foreign rules than their competitors (Likhovski ).…”

Section: Theoretical Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Integrated Model of Legal Transplantation: The Diffusion of Intellectual Property Law in Developing Countries

Morin

¹

,

Gold

²

2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Why do some countries adopt exogenous rules into their domestic law when those rules contravene their specific interests? We draw on the policy-diffusion literature to identify four causal mechanisms that we hypothesize explain the adoption of such rules. While existing literature treats these mechanisms as independent, we argue that each works in combination with the others to facilitate legal transplantation. While one mechanism-coercion-tends to initiate the transplantation process, it fades over time and three others largely supplant it: contractualization, socialization, and regulatory competition. These mechanisms act in a mutually supportive manner. We test our claims via a quantitative analysis of legal transplants in the field of intellectual property (IP) that incorporates an original index of IP protection in 121 developing countries over 14 years. This article concludes with a plea for theoretical eclecticism, acknowledging multi-causality and context-conditionality. Any comprehensive explanation of legal transplantation must include the identification of mutual reinforcement between causal mechanisms, rather than simply rank their relative contributions.

show abstract

An Integrated Model of Legal Transplantation: The Diffusion of Intellectual Property Law in Developing Countries

Morin

¹

,

Gold

²

2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Why do some countries adopt exogenous rules into their domestic law when those rules contravene their specific interests? We draw on the policy-diffusion literature to identify four causal mechanisms that we hypothesize explain the adoption of such rules. While existing literature treats these mechanisms as independent, we argue that each works in combination with the others to facilitate legal transplantation. While one mechanism-coercion-tends to initiate the transplantation process, it fades over time and three others largely supplant it: contractualization, socialization, and regulatory competition. These mechanisms act in a mutually supportive manner. We test our claims via a quantitative analysis of legal transplants in the field of intellectual property (IP) that incorporates an original index of IP protection in 121 developing countries over 14 years. This article concludes with a plea for theoretical eclecticism, acknowledging multi-causality and context-conditionality. Any comprehensive explanation of legal transplantation must include the identification of mutual reinforcement between causal mechanisms, rather than simply rank their relative contributions.

show abstract

Argonauts of the Eastern Mediterranean: Legal Transplants and Signaling

Cited by 3 publications

References 5 publications

Self-Proclaimed Human Rights Heroes: The Professional Project of Israeli Military Judges

Self-Proclaimed Human Rights Heroes: The Professional Project of Israeli Military Judges

An Integrated Model of Legal Transplantation: The Diffusion of Intellectual Property Law in Developing Countries

An Integrated Model of Legal Transplantation: The Diffusion of Intellectual Property Law in Developing Countries

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About