Are Legal Systems Converging or Diverging? - Lessons from Contemporary Crises

This book focuses on two main aspects: legal convergence and crises. Despite the abundance of literature on legal convergence over the years, the question of whether legal systems are converging or diverging remains unanswered. This book provides a valuable contribution to questions concerning comparative law, legal convergence, and legal transplants by examining them through the lens of crises.

Crises challenge countries' legal systems and prompt institutional responses to tackle perceived shortcomings in the law. The crises witnessed by the world over the last two decades have highlighted two seemingly contradictory tendencies:

(i) increased cooperation and a natural phenomenon of legal convergence as states find common solutions to common problems;

(ii) a preference for state-centric solutions, which prioritise domestic interests; rejection of supranational standards and harmonisation efforts; and protection of domestic sovereignty.

This book aims to determine whether, in times of crisis, foreign laws, rules, and concepts can transcend countries' domestic legal systems, or whether states' responses to crises lead to legal divergence and disintegration.

Unlike traditional studies on convergence, this edited volume takes an international and cross-thematic approach, with chapters focusing on how legislation in selected jurisdictions has responded to crises. Therefore, the book's originality lies in its truly global nature, with chapters and authors surveying jurisdictions in Africa, North and South America, Asia, Europe and Oceania. The breadth of legal areas covered, with a mix of private and public law, also add to its uniqueness.

From Russia to Germany and from bankruptcy law to environmental law, the book examines whether, as a result of crises, policy and legal responses have adopted, copied, or implemented features, policies, principles and/or rules from other legal systems (convergence), or have departed from existing legal norms, adopting policies and rules that differ from those of other countries (divergence).

Dr. Emilie Ghio is a lecturer in corporate and insolvency law at the University of Edinburgh. She studied law at the University of Strasbourg in France and at University College Cork in Ireland before moving to England and, eventually, Scotland. She is an established and active corporate insolvency and rescue law scholar with an expansive domestic and international research portfolio, which includes numerous and varied publications (monographs, textbooks, peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings, expert technical magazine articles). Emilie is currently working on several internally and externally funded research projects and is engaged with a wide network of UK, European, and international academics, industry representatives and policymakers  in insolvency law. She currently sits on the board of the Younger Academic Network of Insolvency Law and is the co-editor of the INSOL Europe Conference Proceedings and Yearbook.

Dr. Ricardo Perlingeiro has over three decades of experience as a Federal Court Judge in Brazil and as a professor of International Law and Public Law. He is currently a professor at Fluminense Federal University and Estácio de Sá University (Brazil), as well as a visiting professor at Birmingham City University (United Kingdom) and a visiting researcher at the University of Porto (Portugal). Professor Perlingeiro has published countless books and articles on the topics of international law and public law in Portuguese and other languages, such as Chinese, English, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. He was the Secretary-General of the Committee that developed the Model Code of International Judicial Cooperation for Ibero-America. He is a member of the International Academy of Comparative Law, International Association of Constitutional Law, International Association of Procedural Law, among other academic institutions.