This is a book on comparative law and legal change. With a focus on corporate law and the law of personal property, it reviews the current state of the comparative debate on the evolution of law.

It takes as a starting point the similarities and differences between legal systems as a means to understand the factors that shape legal growth and tests the well-established thesis according to which law tends to develop as a consequence of the movement of legal rules from one country to another. The analysis carried out in the first part of the book finds this thesis perplexing, as, above all, it does not put forward a persuasive account of the mechanisms of legal reception. In attempting to fill that gap, this study contends that recent contributions on culture contact and culture change offer an interesting explanation for the circulation of juridical models across national boundaries.

In brief, this book suggests that the notion of ‘hybridity’, as originated in postcolonial theory, provides a valid conceptual means to examine the intricacies of legal evolution, to refine and to give content to the observation of the reception of law. The notion of hybridity overcomes the rigid dualist perception of culture in the colonial contexts that neatly distinguished between colonisers and colonised and promotes the view that cultural norms in colonial contexts are more than the result of the fusion of features of colonial and indigenous background. They are neither colonial, nor indigenous ‘in disguise’, but they occupy a ‘third space’ between colonial and indigenous cultures. In this light, hybridity is a powerful tool in explaining the pattern of cultural change in social sciences in general and in law in particular. Borrowing reflects a general trend of social life, a mechanism of culture diffusion. It applies to law too because law is itself a form of culture. As with colonial norms and standards, borrowed legal paradigms outside their original meanings become unsettled. They interact at different levels with local traditions, with certain indigenous perceptions, and do not survive in their original identities. A new legal tradition, a hybrid space that is peculiar to the specific contact situation is therefore created. Borrowed legal paradigms become almost the same as the original ones, but not quite.