Colonial Experiences and Contemporary Laws

Although research suggests that countries’ colonial experiences are associated with a range of contemporary outcomes, the link between colonial experiences and the substance of countries’ laws remains unclear. We explore this question while making four improvements over past research. First, we use more detailed data on both countries’ colonial experiences and contemporary substantive laws. Second, we directly assess whether countries’ shared legal origins—that is, whether they had a common law or civil law system—or their colonial origins—that is, which country had previously colonized them—are more associated with differences in their contemporary laws. Third, we use a research design that makes it possible to assess the relationship between countries’ colonial experiences across different areas while accounting for differences in the measurement and coding of those laws. Fourth, we explore how the evolution of these relationships over time. We find that countries with shared colonial experiences have greater agreement in the substance of their contemporary laws compared to countries without shared colonial experiences; however, the effect is roughly twice as large for countries with shared colonial origins compared to those with shared legal origins. Moreover, this relationship is largely consistent across types of legal origins and groups of former colonies.