Resisting Legal Convergence

In 1996, Pierre Legrand wrote an article hypothesising that European legal systems are not converging based factors that create difficulties in changing ingrained legal cultural characteristics. These path dependent characteristics are unique to individual legal systems and influence the fundamental legal principles and concepts that underpin the aims and purposes of the law on the books. Whereas there are certainly similarities in the result of applying similar laws in different jurisdictions, these results are often achieved in different ways. There are also political and cultural perspectives that change in waves over time that will influence the willingness of an electorate to align more closely with other jurisdictions on a global scale. These winds of change create a further and unpredictable influence that creates further obstacles to a sustained convergence over time. Although the world has become ever more global with a connected need to draw legal systems into closer alignment to ensure efficient resolutions to cross-border legal matters since Legrand first introduced his hypothesis, the underlying obstacles to sustained convergence of legal systems remain. This chapter considers whether legal systems are still not converging with potential reasons as to why this may be the case now and continue to be so in the future.