What is a Mixed Legal System : Exclusion or Expansion ?

Can it be satisfactory in our so called globalising age to group localisms under the broad headings of the ‘civil law tradition’ and the ‘common law tradition’ alone and regard other localisms as being derivatives of one of them? As a better approach I suggested a ‘family trees’ approach within which legal systems could be classified according to their constituent elements. This entailed deconstruction or ‘productive disintegration’ and reconstruction of the legal systems that seemed so well settled in their respective families. I found it equally unsatisfactory to concentrate only on legal systems that display substantial civil law and common law influences co-existing or overlapping in their structure and substance, and further still to group these in a ‘third family’. First, not even all the legal systems that are mixtures of civil law and common law have been allocated a place in this family. Second, there are other combinations that are not, and cannot be given a place within this ‘third family’ as it stands, and also, third, when the theory of legal families itself is under challenge, it is not the time to create yet another monolithic one. Thus ‘exclusion’ is a very narrow approach. ‘Expansion’ is to be advocated. Therefore, if mixed systems are to be studied together, certain sub-groups would need to be created: Some would be combinations of common law and civil law, such as Louisiana,