Part IX Trends, Ch.63 Constitutional Transplants, Borrowing, and Migrations

All fields of knowledge are shaped by ideas that travel in time and space. From history to economics to the natural sciences, the circulation of ideas is both ‘a fact of life and a usefully enabling condition of intellectual activity’.1 Law is no exception. As Roscoe Pound remarked in The Formative Era of American Law (1938), the ‘history of a system of law is largely a history of borrowings of legal materials from other legal systems and of assimilation of materials from outside of the law.’2 The development of the English common law, the Roman-Canonic jus...