Students will explore how Common Law has been carried into many parts of the world, and learn how in the modern state, legislated and administrative rules have greatly displaced judicially crafted solutions for the majority of legal problems. After presenting the essential characteristics of Common Law, the course will examine the three major waves of legal globalization: colonization in the 19th Century, the law and development movement of the post World War II period, and the "Washington Consensus" of the post Cold War period. Students will learn how colonial rules interacted with native Chinese law in Hong Kong, the difficulties of transplanting rules from one culture into another, and some aspects of the second-generation review of transplanted rules currently taking place. A main focus of the course will be to examine how rules (colonial, statutory and regulatory) have interacted with judicial action. We will in particular see how in the 20th Century, statutes and rules steadily came to dominate the field, leading to a convergence both of many individual bodies of rules and of the larger systems of Common and Civil Law. In sum, two sources of change will be studied: influence between legal systems and change within legal systems in response to changing circumstances. We will conclude with an investigation of the convergence of Common Law and Civil Law based not on geography and heritage, but on the type of problems addressed by a given law, the density of information and expert commentary available, and the existence of competent rule-making bodies. The course should give students a solid grasp of how legal systems can influence each other at the international level. It will introduce students to a debate on the quality of legal systems that has clouded the work of the World Bank and other development law projects in recent years. The course should particularly assist students in understanding and evaluating the policy thinking behind the transplanting of foreign models or laws into China, Hong Kong or another jurisdiction. It should also give students some insight into the legal history of Hong Kong.