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Legal Irritants: Good Faith in British Law or How Unifying Law Ends Up in New Divergencies
Author(s) -
Teubner Gunther
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
the modern law review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.37
H-Index - 22
eISSN - 1468-2230
pISSN - 0026-7961
DOI - 10.1111/1468-2230.00125
Subject(s) - law , metaphor , legal realism , unintended consequences , context (archaeology) , political science , civil law (civil law) , faith , legal opinion , private law , legal history , sociology , legal profession , public law , black letter law , epistemology , philosophy , history , linguistics , archaeology
Legal transplant is an unsatisfactory metaphor for describing the transfer of legal rules from one legal system to another. Instead, the metaphor of legal irritant better describes the impact on the legal system, and then a distinction between tight and loose coupling between law and its social context better explains the trajectory of social effects. The example of the importation of the civil law concept of good faith into British law illustrates the co‐evolving trajectories of the legal system and tightly coupled social systems which instead of furthering harmonisation of laws produces new divergences as their unintended consequences.