Varieties of legal systems: towards a new global taxonomy

Abstract

Legal scholars, economists and other social scientist often refer to the idea that countries can be classified into a number of ‘legal families’ or ‘legal origins’. Yet, this research is unsatisfactory as regards the actual classifications of the legal systems of the world. It is the aim of this paper to fill this gap and to develop a more robust taxonomy of legal systems. This taxonomy is based on a new dataset of 156 countries that is subsequently analysed with tools of network analysis. Applying cluster optimisation, this paper finds that the world's legal systems can be divided into four clusters. It displays those clusters in a map, akin to the Inglehart–Welzel cultural map. It is suggested that those findings have important implications, not only for our understanding of the legal world, but also for the feasibility of legal transplants and harmonisation.

Rethinking Delegated Legislation in Indonesian Legal System

“…Mathias M. Siems stated that there are at least 156 (one hundred and fifty-six) countries that have legal systems. Of the 156 countries, Mathias M. Siem divided into 4 (four) clusters of legal systems as the origin of the legal system (Siems, 2016). The original legal system is a legal system that affects and develops in these 156 countries.…”

Complex Societies and the Growth of the Law

“…As demonstrated in "Clustering for comparative and dynamic analysis", however, qualitative analyses of the legal rules contained in our document networks can yield further insights, and this opens opportunities for normative legal research in areas such as comparative law and legal theory [39][40][41] . In these legal disciplines, the United States and Germany are usually classified as following different legal traditions, also referred to as legal families, and the categorization, though commonly accepted, has not been corroborated by empirical studies [42][43][44][45] . Last but not least, the findings reported in this paper are based on a set of choices for methods and parameters.…”

How May National Culture Shape Public Policy? The Case of Energy Policy in China

“…China's legal system has several unique features that distinguish it from those in other countries, whether they be authoritarian regimes with rule by law, western democracies practicing the rule of law, or other types of mixed or immature legal systems (Siems, 2016). The approach to law arose from an amalgamation of ideas from several schools of thought, among which the Legalist and Confucian schools were prominent as in the political sphere (Chang, 2016).…”