LEGAL systems typically combine in themselves ideas, principles, rules, and procedures originating from a variety of sources. Both in the contemporary world and historically, the law manifests itself in a variety of forms and at a variety of levels. This fact has of course been known for a good many centuries and jurists have given it a considerable amount of study within their respective systems of law. The purpose of this book is not to repeat existing work on the diverse origins and legal ideas within civil law, common law, or socialist law systems but to describe the systems of legal pluralism in the contemporary world which have resulted from the transfer of whole legal systems across cultural boundaries. This process began in the seventeenth century with the expansion of the civil law and common law systems outside Europe and reached its greatest extent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The laws with which the ‘Western’ laws came into contact included the great ethical and religious systems as well as numberless varieties of unwritten laws. The result has been that large portions of the globe are subject to laws the principles of which are drawn from a number of widely differing cultures.