Legal Transplants: The Sri Lankan Experience

This chapter reports a story from colonial times in Sri Lanka to the present day of the transplant into that jurisdiction of credit and security law. It specifically examines some of the dimensions of legal transplants by outlining, in relation to Sri Lanka, one aspect of commercial law, the law of security. The story is as interesting as it is complex. Two aspects are focused on in the following account. The first is the transplant of Western commercial law in Sri Lanka and the mosaic it produced. English commercial law was transplanted to Sri Lanka as part of colonization, but it was overlaid on the Roman-Dutch law dating from the period of Dutch power. The second aspect is the relationship of this transplant to societal needs, in particular commercial needs. It can be stated that the transplant of commercial law into Sri Lanka was the result of a combination of historical circumstances.