Law and economics are strongly influenced by tradition or legal origin, which are the set of institutions that shape legislation and dispute resolution. The two main legal traditions, common law and civil law, were transplanted by colonization and occupation in the vast majority of the world`s jurisdictions by a group of European countries. I illustrate here a new set of data that records the legislative institution employed by 155 of these courts at independence and in 2000, and four discretionary judicial institutions adopted by 99 of these “transplants” on the same two dates. Contrary to the hypothesis of “legal origins”, 25 transplants have modified the transplanted legislative institution and 95 have modified at least one of the transplanted legislative and jurisprudential rules. In “Endogenous Legal Traditions” (Guerriero, 2016a) [12], I document that these reforms are consistent with a model of formation of legal institutions by societies that heterogeneously equip both the extent of cultural heterogeneity and the quality of the political process. In “Endogenous Legal Traditions and Economic Outcomes” (Guerriero, 2016b) [13], I also show the relevance of considering legal development and endogeneity between legal traditions and economic outcomes. The data presented here also include the approximations of the determinants of legal development that I use in “Endogenous Legal Traditions” (Guerriero, 2016a) [12] and the new measure of economic outcomes that I use in “Endogenous Legal Traditions and Economic Outcomes” (Guerriero, 2016b) [13]. Perhaps the most economically relevant example of such a transplant is the laws of a country, particularly its commercial laws. Countries colonized by the United Kingdom generally have laws heavily influenced by those of England; The countries colonized by France, Spain and Portugal have laws influenced by their respective colonizers. Spain and Portugal themselves have laws heavily influenced by those of France, which they inherited from the Napoleonic conquest. Sometimes such legal transplantation takes the simple form of copying laws; In other cases, the influence is less direct, motivated by the linguistic community and the training of lawyers and politicians, which often took place in the colonizing country or in the universities it established in its colonies.

The dataset consists of cross-sectional observations of 155 countries that received their original legal tradition exogenously mainly through colonization or occupation, i.e. transplantation. For this example, I report in the Excel file “OIL_W” legislative and judicial institutions at independence and in the year 2000, the approximations of the determinants of their development, which I discuss in [12], as well as the continuous level of legal traditions and a measure of social welfare that I apply in [13]. While the legislative institution determines the identity of the legislative power – that is, the government, the legislature or the president according to the law and the appellate judges according to the judicial branch, judicial institutions modulate the discretion that the legal system grants to the lower courts [5], [10], [20], [22]. The drivers of the development of legal traditions are the extent of cultural diversity and the quality of the political process. For 99 of the 155 registries mentioned above [9], they analyze the rules of procedure to resolve two ubiquitous legal disputes: the collection of a bouncy check and the eviction of a non-paying tenant. From this information, I deduce four variables measured in 2000: 1. Consolidated appeal, i.e. an appeal where issues of law and fact can be heard on appeal, and zero, where only new evidence or points of law can be considered, or where there is no appeal; 2. the right to judgment, i.e.

a right if judgments must be based solely on the law, and zero if they can be based on equity; 3. Inquisitorium, i.e. 1 where judges may request or collect evidence not produced by the parties and may refuse to collect or admit the evidence requested, 0.5 if they have only one of the two privileges, and 0 otherwise; 4. Written evidence, i.e. one if the evidence is usually submitted to the court in writing and otherwise void. A large comparative law group asserts that the four variables are equal to one in a pure civil law jurisdiction and equal to zero in a pure common law system [15, pp. 52, pp. 123-127; 22, p.

272]. As jurists have long recognized, the differences between legal traditions are not merely formal. The common law tradition tends to be less interventionist and more supportive of private sector agreements. The civil law tradition tends to be more interventionist and state-oriented, which restricts such agreements. According to one jurist, civil law is the “implementation of policies”, while common law is the “settlement of disputes” (Damaška, 1986). In the words of another, French civil law includes “socially conditioned private contracts,” as opposed to common law support for “unconditional private contracts” (Pistor, 2006). These are profound historical features of the attitude of the law, which have continued to have an effect in legal families through transplantation.