This volume marks the culmination of the first stage of a collaborative project designed to showcase legal innovation and adaptation in the Global South. The volume has two main objectives. The first is to introduce the concept of legal heterodoxy to capture legal institutions that diverge from those which have achieved the status of orthodoxy in the Global North. The second objective is to illustrate the variety of forms legal heterodoxy can take in the Global South.

The idea for this project was originally sparked during a dinner conversation at the Annual Meeting of the American Law and Economics Association, held at New York University School of Law in May 2019. Initial drafts of the chapters in this volume were presented and discussed at a special conference convened by NYU and the University of Buenos Aires on April 13–14, 2023 in Buenos Aires. Additionally, a subset of the authors had the opportunity to present and discuss their drafts in a conference held at FGV Law School in São Paulo on May 17, 2023. These sessions were invaluable in helping us to refine the chapters and we are grateful to everyone who participated.

The broader aim of the project is to demonstrate the value of including scholarship on and from the Global South in academic debates about law and legal institutions. We hope that our efforts will encourage other scholars not only to explore other aspects of legal heterodoxy but also to examine other distinctive features of legal systems in the Global South.