The relationship between comparative law literature and economic scholarship on legal families is replete with remarkable ironies. The legal origins’ theory, as one will see in the following chapter, relies heavily on the classifications of legal families devised by comparative law scholars. Yet economists popularized the concept of legal families precisely when comparative lawyers began to abandon this landmark contribution of their own field.

a) Common-law and civil-law

Comparisons among foreign legal systems, whether casual or profound, have a long history—and so does the idea that English law is significantly different from the French and Roman law. The effort to extrapolate from differing legal systems and divide the world map into a handful of “legal families” based on the heritage and character of the underlying legal systems is far more recent. This approach is closely intertwined with the history of modern-day comparative law itself, a discipline whose birth, for most scholars, dates to about the early 1900s. However, reigning conceptions of legal families have varied over time, casting doubt on the systematic reliability and historicity of these categories.

The central importance of legal families as one of the main theoretical achievements of comparative law came in the 1960s due to the work of important comparative law scholars, including Konrad Zweigert and Hein Kötz. In 1969, these authors proposed a well-known classificatory, recognizing common-law and civil-law systems. They subdivided the civil-law family into three separate branches: the French, the German and the Scandinavian civil-law systems. The three civil-law families, together with the common-law, far-Eastern law, Islamic law and Hindu law families, defined the main “styles” of legal systems around the globe. The scheme advanced by Zweigert and Kötz was widely popular and came to be the substantial basis for the literature on legal families. This categorization was, remarkably, of relatively minor importance in their treatise, whose primary purpose was to redefine the study of comparative law in functional terms. This intellectual ambition was far different from the legal families’ project.

The rapidly expanding legal origins’ theory (see Chapter 4) in the late 1990s related conventional legal-family classifications to major economic variables and relevant puzzles in the development literature (e.g., why some countries grow successfully and others do not, why there is a trap for middle-income countries, which legal institutions are important in explaining successful and unsuccessful reforms).