TRANSPLANTING SERVITUDE: THE STRANGE HISTORY OF HAWAI 'I' S US-INSPIRED CONTRACT LABOR LAW

In 1850, as a part of a larger program of Western-influenced legal reform, the independent Kingdom of Hawai 'i passed a contract labor statute adapted from existing U.S. state laws to meet the perceived need for a reliable plantation labor force. For the next five decades, this statute the Masters and Servants Act served as the legal foundation for Hawai 'i's rapidly expanding sugar industry, facilitating the arrival of roughly 150,000 immigrants throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Within the field of comparative law, the study of legal transplants legal rules borrowed from one nation and adopted in another has operated under the assumption that the transfer of those rules necessarily brings the two legal systems closer together. The case study developed in this Note suggests that convergence is not the only possible result: as it turns out, the Masters and Servants Act actually drove divergence between the U.S. and Hawaiian legal systems and conflict between the two nations' governments. The Act incorporated legal rules that had already become obsolete in their place of origin, and it helped create a plantation labor system that was soon decried by U.S. critics as closely resembling slavery. When Hawa'i was annexed by the United States at the end of the century, repeal of the Masters and Servants Act was among the top US. priorities. Considering the Masters and Servants Act, and the legal regime it engendered, through the lens of legal transplantation thus provides an opportunity to rethink how legal transplants work and what it means for a transplant to be successful.