The Pitfalls of Cross-Cultural Legal Capacity Building

American legal and technical experts regularly travel to other countries to participate in capacity building activities. Supported by governmental and private organizations, these experts invest considerable time and effort trying to assist other countries, many of them emerging democracies, to develop and strengthen their legal systems. In particular, this has become common in environmental law, an area in which American law has a relatively long and successful track record in fostering pollution reduction and resource preservation. American assistance can help another "host" country develop its own regime of environmental law with less effort and greater success than if the host country simply began from scratch.¹

Yet, export of American legal expertise is also subject to pitfalls that American experts do not readily recognize. Every legal regime is a product of the political, social, economic, and historical context in which it operates. Each addition to the law also reflects the preexisting legal arrangements. It is difficult for Americans, operating within the American context, to identify the peculiar characteristics of that context or how it has influenced American environmental law. It is also difficult for people who have spent all their professional lives in the United States to see what features of the American political system are peculiarly American, what traits of the American society are not shared by other modern democracies, the ways in which the American economic system is unique to America, the degree to which special features of American history have influenced American law, and how accepted legal doctrines that they view as axiomatic might be peculiar to the United States. American lawyers are so accustomed to the features of the American landscape that they do not easily see how they are absorbed into or reflected in the American laws, nor do they see the unstated assumptions in the American legal system that may be based on these various factors.