Edinburgh Napier University

  This edited volume investigates legal convergence. It takes an international and thematical approach where chapters focus on how selected legal areas in selected jurisdictions have responded to contemporary crises. The volume aims to provide some insights as to whether national legal systems are indeed truly converging or whether globalisation and integration have come to a halt and the world is witnessing a phenomenon of disintegration.

The volume relies on two important real-word phenomena: globalisation and crises. These developments have challenged countries’ legal systems and prompted some institutional responses to tackle perceived shortcomings in specific legal fields. Although many countries around the world have, in the last twenty years, reformed their domestic systems, these efforts have been underscored by a host of events such as, inter alia, the financial crisis of 2007, the refugee crisis in Europe, Brexit in 2016 and Covid-19 in 2019. This book therefore investigates whether policy and legal responses from Russia and Chile to Germany and Japan, have re-created features of other legal systems (convergence) or rather, have departed from existing legal norms and policies (divergence).
Studies in convergence or divergence have usually adopted: (i) a purely thematical approach, i.e. comparatively studying whether one area of law is converging across countries; (ii) a common law versus civil law dichotomy; (iii) a purely theoretical or historical perspective; (iv) a focus on international entities (especially the EU); (v) an interdisciplinary approach, usually mixing law, political sciences and/or economics; or (vi) a focus on the evolution of an area of law following a specific crisis.

The originality of our proposed edited volume lies in:
(i) its truly global nature, with chapters and authors surveying jurisdictions in Africa, America, South America, Asia, Europe and Oceania;
(ii) its breath of legal areas, with a mix of private law areas and public law areas; and
(iii) its focus on the evolution of these fields following varied domestic and international contemporary crises.