The Concept of Acculturation and of Legal Acculturation

The concept of acculturation, in general, represents more than the cultural contact; acculturation supposes the interaction between the two cultures, their interweaving and their synthetic effect, and not a simple approach of the two cultural entities. That is why acculturation is a complex social process including aspects related to the replacement of some cultural elements, the combination of some elements into new cultural complexes or the total rejection of certain elements. Based on these principles, legal acculturation may occur when two national legal systems come into permanent contact without one's exercising a military, political, economic or religious domination over the other one. In this process, each system freely borrows law elements from one another in order to integrate them. The phenomenon usually occurs in the case when a social group understands that the autochthonous legal solutions prove to be unsatisfactory. In this case, such group may face a foreign solution which, as the case may be, it will adopt by incorporating it into its own legal system or, on the contrary, will reject it. If the law rule is important and refers to fundamental elements of a legal institution and contributes to the transformation of such institution in its entirety, it either confines to the literal takeover of the foreign legal norm, or it operates a synthesis in which elements of the autochthonous law are integrated with elements of the foreign law thus resulting to a new juridical institution.