The Americanization of Swiss Legal Culture: Highlights of Cultural Encounters in an Evolving Transatlantic History of Law

We have witnessed a sharp rise in the quest for a methodologically sound analysis of the “migration,”1 “transfer,”2 and “borrowing”3 of concepts between different legal systems.4 At the time of its foundation as a modern federal state in 1848, the Swiss Confederation (Switzerland) formed a republican island in an ocean of monarchies in the heart of Europe. The foundation of the United States of America, in turn, may be viewed as the first large-scale experiment in federal republicanism in the modern era, having been initiated at a time when what today constitutes Switzerland was a rather loose confederation of...