Legal Transplant and Undue Influence: Lost in Translation or a Working Misunderstanding

Event date
3 June 2020
Event time
10:30 - 12:00
Oxford week
Venue
via Zoom
Speaker(s)
Prof. Mindy Chen-Wishart

The life of legal transplants is contingent on a wide range of variables triggered by the particular transplant; the result can occupy any point along the spectrum from faithful replication to outright rejection. Professor Chen-Wishart presents a case study of the transplant of the English doctrine of undue influence from a Judaeo-Christian society into Singapore, a multi-cultural society with a strong Confucian centre of gravity. She asks why the Singaporean courts have applied the doctrine in family guarantee cases to such divergent effect, when they profess to apply the same law. The answer owes less to grand theories than to a careful examination of the nature of the transplanted law and the relationship between the formal and informal legal orders of the originating and the recipient society raised by the particular transplant.

 

About the speaker: 

Prof. Mindy Chen-Wishart is Professor of the Law of Contract & Tutorial Fellow in Law, Merton College Incoming Dean, Oxford Law Faculty.

 

Found within

Business Law