Professor Przemysław Drapała (Partner at JDP) is a co-editor of the newly published monograph False Friends in Comparative Law. Advantages and Risks of Legal Transplants in Civil Law: A Polish–German Perspective, edited together with Professor Fryderyk Zoll and Dr Elwira Macierzyńska-Franaszczyk.
Can legal institutions be successfully transplanted from one legal system to another? Do legal concepts borrowed from a foreign jurisdiction retain their original function, or do they acquire a different meaning once introduced into a new legal environment?
These questions lie at the heart of False Friends in Comparative Law. Advantages and Risks of Legal Transplants in Civil Law: A Polish–German Perspective, co-edited by Professor Przemysław Drapała, Professor Fryderyk Zoll and Dr Elwira Macierzyńska-Franaszczyk.
The publication is the outcome of a research project funded by the Polish-German Foundation for Science and carried out by scholars from Kozminski University, Osnabrück University, the University of Warsaw and the Jagiellonian University.
The monograph addresses one of the key issues in comparative law and legal methodology: legal transplants, understood as the transfer of legal rules, institutions, doctrinal concepts and judicial reasoning from one legal system to another. The authors demonstrate that such transfers are never merely technical exercises. Every legal institution is embedded within a broader doctrinal framework, constitutional order and legal culture, and once detached from that context, it may acquire a significantly different meaning and function.
The volume focuses on the relationship between German and Polish private law. It examines both successful examples of comparative borrowing and cases of so-called false friends—situations in which German legal concepts have been adopted selectively or without sufficient regard to their original systemic foundations, resulting in outcomes different from those in the legal system from which they originate.
The authors argue that meaningful comparative analysis requires more than identifying similarities between legal institutions. It also calls for a thorough understanding of their function, place within the legal system and underlying values. The conclusions presented in the monograph provide valuable guidance for legislators, judges, legal practitioners and legal scholars alike.
False Friends in Comparative Law. Advantages and Risks of Legal Transplants in Civil Law: A Polish–German Perspective is available both in print and in Open Access.
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