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Article
Drawing the Legal Family Tree: An Empirical Comparative Study of 170 Dimensions of Property Law in 129 Jurisdictions
Journal of Legal Analysis (2021)
  • Yun-chien Chang, Academia Sinica
  • Nuno Garoupa, George Mason University
  • Martin T. Wells, Cornell University
Abstract
Traditional comparative private law scholars have firm grasp of laws in several countries, but rarely 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 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 empirical 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. A handful of former communistic 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. They actually belong to groups distant from one another. 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.
Keywords
  • common law,
  • civil law,
  • legal substance,
  • average-linkage clustering,
  • sparse linear discriminant analysis (LDA)
Disciplines
Publication Date
2021
Citation Information
Yun-chien Chang, Nuno Garoupa and Martin T. Wells. "Drawing the Legal Family Tree: An Empirical Comparative Study of 170 Dimensions of Property Law in 129 Jurisdictions" Journal of Legal Analysis Vol. 12 (2021)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/nunogaroupa/141/