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The primary purpose of this article is to enrich the understanding of tort law in Ethiopia and Eritrea and how it affects the environment. Its standpoint is both positive and normative. Its secondary goal is to clarify the affinities, often hidden, between the issues raised by tort law in developing countries now and the same issues as they emerged in the Western tradition in the past. Methodologically, the article considers the interplay between two powerful tools of analysis: law and economics, and legal pluralism (as informed by the doctrine of legal stratification).

Notwithstanding the well-known differences that run through cultures and traditions, the West has never stopped trying to export its own law into the rest of the world. During and after the colonial era similar endeavors were spreading Western views on how legal issues are to be understood and handled, thereby broadening the West’s area of influence on global legal affairs. More recently, these efforts have overlapped with (and have been blurred by the rhetorical veil of) so-called legal globalization. The focus of this Article is on the attitudes and methods underpinning the ongoing Western attempts to transplant the two pillars of Western civilization, i.e., democracy and the rule of law, into outside contexts. Confronted with processes that concern different legal systems, this Article cannot but take a comparative law approach. Such an approach entails a careful consideration of the historical and contextual factors and will enable an analysis of data that are usually either discarded or underrated in mainstream legal debates. Thus notions, ideas, and debates about the rule of law and democracy will be reappraised from a comparative law point of view in order to both unearth their intimate legal foundations and to scrutinize their potential for being transplanted outside Western societies. The analysis will show how this potential, to the extent that it exists, can only be exploited through a radical shift from the usual way in which the West approaches the legal settings it aims to change.