Drawing the Legal Family Tree: An Empirical Comparative Study of 170 Dimensions of Property Law in 129 Jurisdictions. (29th April 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Chang, Yun-chien; Garoupa, Nuno; Wells, Martin T
• Is Part Of: Journal of legal analysis. Volume 13:Number 1(2021)
• Page Start: 231
• Page End: 282
• Publication Date: 2021-04-29
• Subjects: Jurisprudence -- United States -- Periodicals; Law -- United States -- Periodicals; 347.7305
• DOI: 10.1093/jla/laaa004
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2161-7201

Abstract

Abstract: Traditional comparative private law scholars have a firm grasp of laws in several countries, but rarely of those in more than one hundred countries. Quantitative comparative private law scholars have placed dozens of countries into a legal family genealogy, but not based on a systematic understanding of legal substance around the world. Using a unique, hand-coded data set on 108 property doctrines (transformed into 170 binary variables) in 129 jurisdictions, we ran supervised and unsupervised machine-learning algorithms. Some of our findings confirm the conventional wisdom: French and German property laws are influential; mixed jurisdictions like South Africa and Scotland are one of a kind; common law jurisdictions form a group of their own; and a handful of formerly socialist countries, led by Russia, cluster together. Unlike the prior literature, however, we do not find that East Asian jurisdictions warrant a category of their own; but belong to distant groups. Spain and many Latin American countries form a separate group. Rather than finding a clear-cut common versus civil law division, we observe that the France-inspired group is one supercluster, separate from other jurisdictions.