An Integrated Model of Legal Transplantation: The Diffusion of Intellectual Property Law in Developing Countries

Why do some countries adopt exogenous rules into their domestic law when those rules contravene their specific interests? We draw on the policy-diffusion literature to identify four causal mechanisms that we hypothesize explain the adoption of such rules. While existing literature treats these mechanisms as independent, we argue that each works in combination with the others to facilitate legal transplantation. While one mechanism—coercion—tends to initiate the transplantation process, it fades over time and three others largely supplant it: contractualization, socialization, and regulatory competition. These mechanisms act in a mutually supportive manner. We test our claims via a quantitative analysis of legal transplants in the field of intellectual property (IP) that incorporates an original index of IP protection in 121 developing countries over more than 14 years. This article concludes with a plea for theoretical eclecticism, acknowledging multicausality and context-conditionality. Any comprehensive explanation of legal transplantation must include the identification of mutual reinforcement between causal mechanisms, rather than simply rank their relative contributions.