Comparison and Rethinking the Classification of Legal ‎Systems in the Light of Socio-Cultural Commonalities and ‎Differences

Due to the change in the world’s legal map, the emergence of new powers, and the creation of new ideas in legal philosophy, Rene David’s famous classification which is based on Western thought, has faced serious challenges. Thus it is necessary to introduce a functionalist classification in order to describe the world’s legal map. This paper, by using library research tools and relying on the factors that construct social rules, tries to classify the existing legal paradigms based on their salient characteristics. The benefit of classifying legal systems is that such classification is based on a prior understanding of similarities and differences in legal paradigms which then makes the success or failure of legal transplantation measurable. Thus, with an emphasize on the knowledge of criminal law, this paper has classified the world’s legal systems into three paradigms: the rule of professional law, the rule of political law, and the rule of traditional law. Consequently, it would be easier to transplant national systems from each of these categories by common assumptions, and in contrast, it would be arduous to transplant legal systems under different categories.