The Transplant of Talmudic Legal Reasoning

Since Alan Watson’s book on Legal Transplants, legal comparatists have in mind the transplant, transfer, borrowing of legal rules or even legal institutions: it is a rule that you transfer from one legal culture to another one. I want to show that it is also possible to transplant other legal devices, namely to transfer legal reasoning or arguments. The claim is made from the field of comparative law including Talmudic law. I first illustrate the feasibility of legal reasoning transplant through the description of typically Talmudic line of reasoning. I strongly rely, among other things, on lists of Halachic hermeneutic rules but my research also includes other lines of reasoning (miggo, hekesh, dayyo, stam, etc). I offer a mapping of the different legal lines of reasoning through different legal cultures and show the ones that are specifically Talmudic. In a second step, I suggest which of these types of legal reasoning could possibly be exported, transplanted, to non Talmudic law. This would imply that Talmudic law could to some extent in the future play the role of paradigm and main resource for comparative lawyers, role that was traditionally played until today by Roman law in comparative jurisprudence.