Document Type
Working Paper
Publication Date
2026
Subjects
legal culture, environmental law
Abstract
Lawyers build from templates. Accounts of how law is made rarely mention them. New legislation tends to present itself as original. It is almost never made from scratch. This article makes the hidden process visible. It does so through a study of the near-global spread of environmental impact assessment (EIA) legislation since 1969, using computer-assisted textual similarity analysis to trace what I expected to be identifiable model laws and clear lines of legal inheritance. The search yielded instead a transnational repertoire of legal fragments, repeatedly recombined into new legislative forms across different legal traditions, languages and decades. EIA's legislative spread was bricolage, not cut and paste. The findings sit uneasily with conventional accounts of legal change built around origins, diffusion, and influence: accounts that shaped the inquiry but could not contain its conclusions. Templates travel without attribution, persist without citation and shape legal imagination without being named. They are not simply conduits for legal rules. They establish the defaults from which legal actors work and from which alternatives must struggle to depart. What law can readily see, know and imagine is quietly shaped by the forms through which it is made.
Citation Details
Natasha Affolder, "Model Law? Template Legal Culture and the Global Production of Environmental Law" [forthcoming in Current Legal Problems].