Dr. Myra Williamson
Associate Professor of Law at Kuwait International Law School – Kuwait

Abstract:

This paper seeks to examine the phenomenon of the diffusion of Western legal concepts in non-Western legal systems, focusing upon one legal system in particular, namely Kuwait. Before embarking on this project, a few introductory remarks are offered regarding the paper’s purpose and perspective.
First, the paper adopts a prima facie comparative law approach but it is interdisciplinary to the extent that law is always (necessarily) interdisciplinary. The borders between the study of law, politics, history, economics, geography, language, sociology, psychology, religion, philosophy, anthropology, and virtually any other area of study in the humanities, are always somewhat blurred. The more one learns about the law and different legal systems, the fuzzier those borders become. That is a good thing. The law is, of course, a social construct and it can never be studied with any meaning in isolation from the contributions made by those other branches of the humanities.
Second, it is noted that this is not a pure ‘comparative law’ paper in the sense of comprehensively and systematically comparing two or more legal systems against one another although some simple comparisons will be noted. A few tentative comparisons are drawn between Kuwait and New Zealand without artificially extending this comparison beyond what it can stand but this paper does not purport to provide a comparative analysis of the New Zealand and Kuwaiti legal systems. The purpose is to explore the diffusion of Western legal concepts in Kuwait in three specific areas but the discussion goes beyond the law and touches upon related areas of study such as legal history, religion, sociology and the teaching of law.

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