There are evenings when I walk through my apartment as if the apartment were a badly designed republic whose entire constitutional order depends upon the imagination of one person, and I take upon myself, with a seriousness that is immediately undermined by the absurdity of the situation, the role of the president of the United States and then the president of Iran, sometimes within the same minute, waving at cameras that are not there, pausing in the middle of the living room as though journalists were waiting for a statement, changing my voice when I imagine one office speaking and then changing it again when the other office answers, until I become sufficiently aware of myself to understand that I am, in fact, only walking around my own house and performing politics for an audience consisting of no one.

The performance sometimes continues into the bathroom, where the absurdity becomes more intimate and, strangely enough, more philosophical: sitting on the toilet before washing myself, I imagine that I am being interviewed simultaneously in both capacities, asked questions about Iran, America, law, sovereignty, democracy, the future, and the possibility of political life, and I answer in both voices because there is no institutional mechanism inside the bathroom capable of preventing me from becoming two presidents at once.

There is something childish about this ritual, but the longer I have continued it, the less interested I have become in its childishness and the more interested I have become in the peculiar structure of the body that performs it, because the body remains stubbornly singular even while the identities through which it speaks multiply, and the room remains physically small even while the world to which the body is attending becomes almost impossibly large. The bathroom does not cease to be a bathroom merely because I imagine myself elsewhere, nor does my body become physically American, Iranian, presidential, or diplomatic because I temporarily inhabit those political positions in language; what changes is the field through which the body encounters the world, the number of places from which it can receive meaning, the number of bodies with which it can establish relations, and the number of political and legal possibilities that can become perceptible from within an otherwise ordinary physical existence.

After the protests of 2026, however, this private comedy became difficult to experience as merely comedy, because when communication was interrupted and violence entered the field of ordinary life, the body in the bathroom ceased to appear to me as an isolated body playing with political identities and began to appear as a small and vulnerable part of something much larger, a distributed body whose other parts were elsewhere, speaking, watching, suffering, documenting, remembering, communicating, disappearing, and attempting to make the experience of one place intelligible to bodies located in another. The bathroom remained a place in which I could think, but I could no longer imagine that thinking occurred outside the world that I was thinking about. I could no longer imagine that the political was something that happened elsewhere and that my body merely observed it. The body itself had become an instrument through which the world entered, and through which an attempt was made to answer it.

I want to begin from this peculiar movement between comedy and vulnerability because it allows us to approach a problem that is usually described in the language of legal transplantation, institutional borrowing, or comparative law, but which, I will argue, requires another vocabulary: adaptive legal re-coding, by which I mean the process through which a legal tradition encounters something foreign, identifies the historical and normative problem to which the foreign institution responds, translates that problem into its own conceptual language, tests the translation against its inherited resources and contemporary circumstances, and thereby changes itself without simply becoming the other from which it has learned. The question is no longer merely how one legal order can borrow from another, but how a body situated within one tradition can encounter a world increasingly distributed through technology and transform that encounter into a new capacity for legal thought. In this sense, the problem of legal adaptation is inseparable from the problem of embodiment, and the problem of embodiment has become inseparable from the technological conditions under which Generation Z encounters the world.

More than a century before the technological conditions of such an encounter became imaginable, Mirza Yusuf Mustashar al-Dawleh was already confronting a related problem from an entirely different historical position. A diplomat, traveler, and observer of foreign institutions, he encountered the political and legal organization of other societies not as an abstract philosophical exercise but through movement, comparison, and prolonged exposure to worlds that did not correspond neatly to the institutional world from which he came.

His experience in Tiflis became particularly important because it produced not a theory of Europe in the abstract but a painful comparative awareness of Iran’s own condition. In Yek Kalameh (One Word), he recalls: “In the year 1280 AH … I stayed in Tiflis for four years, and during my residence in the country mentioned, when I saw the order, strength of the military, comfort, and prosperity, I constantly wished that in Iran also such order, strength, comfort, and prosperity might be achieved” (Yek Kalameh, p. 72).

What matters here is not simply that Mustashar al-Dawleh admired what he saw, because admiration alone would tell us very little, but that the foreign world became for him a means of making his own world visible. Tiflis did not replace Iran in his imagination; it altered the question through which Iran could be understood. The encounter with another institutional order produced an internal disturbance, and the disturbance produced comparison, but comparison did not terminate in imitation. This is precisely the point at which adaptive re-coding begins. The foreign is not valuable because it is foreign, nor is the inherited valuable merely because it is inherited; each becomes intellectually significant through the encounter in which the one forces the other to become newly intelligible.

Mustashar al-Dawleh’s achievement therefore lies not simply in recognizing that European societies possessed institutions that Iran lacked, but in recognizing that what he encountered abroad had to be interpreted before it could become meaningful at home. The problem was never simply to transport a legal arrangement across a geographical border, because a legal arrangement does not exist independently of the historical problem that produced it, the institutional environment in which it operates, the social expectations that sustain it, and the vocabulary through which a population understands its legitimacy. A rule may be copied, but its meaning cannot be copied in the same manner. Meaning has to be reconstructed.

This is why Yek Kalameh should be read not only as a text advocating law but as an experiment in translation between normative worlds. When Mustashar al-Dawleh describes France, he writes that “all the conditions and arrangements relating to worldly affairs are gathered there; the government and the nation are united and committed to preserving and enforcing the law in their country; the law is universal and encompasses all the inhabitants of a country; and it is applied equally, so that the king, the beggar, the subject, and the soldier are all bound by it” (Yek Kalameh, pp. 74–75).

The significance of this passage is not exhausted by the claim that France possessed a legal order or that equality before law was desirable. More fundamentally, Mustashar al-Dawleh is isolating a function: law creates a field in which political power itself becomes subject to a norm that is not exhausted by the identity of the person exercising power. The king, the beggar, the subject, and the soldier can be different in status, position, wealth, and institutional authority, but the juridical form of their relation to law is presented as common.

The foreign institution therefore becomes intelligible not because it is copied but because its function can be translated into a question that matters within another tradition: how can power become answerable to a general norm, how can law become comprehensive rather than selective, how can political authority be transformed from an arbitrary relation into an institutional one, and how can a society construct a form of order in which the law does not merely regulate the weak but binds the powerful as well?

Once the foreign institution is understood at this level, it ceases to be an object of imitation and becomes a resource for self-interpretation. The crucial movement is from form to function, from institution to problem, from foreign example to internal question. This is what I mean by adaptive re-coding. It is neither the rejection of the foreign in the name of authenticity nor the reproduction of the foreign in the name of progress; it is the transformation of foreign experience into a question that the receiving tradition must answer in its own language, through its own historical resources, and under the pressure of its own concrete problems.

Mustashar al-Dawleh’s most remarkable move occurs when this process of translation turns back toward the Islamic inheritance itself. He writes: “Now, if you turn your attention to the contents of the codes of France and other civilized states, you will see how the circulation of the thoughts of the nations and the experiences of the peoples of the world have confirmed the sacred law of Islam, and you will understand that whatever good law exists in Europe, through which its peoples have acted and raised themselves to the highest degree, your Prophet established and ordained for the Islamic nation 1280 years ago” (Yek Kalameh, p. 80).

The philosophical significance of this passage is extraordinary precisely because it reverses the expected direction of imitation. Europe is not simply the source of modernity and Islam the passive recipient of European instruction; rather, the encounter with European law becomes an occasion for the reinterpretation of Islamic law, and European experience becomes evidence through which elements of the inherited tradition can be rediscovered.

The foreign therefore does not merely enter the tradition; it changes what the tradition is capable of seeing in itself. This is the deeper meaning of appropriation. A tradition that learns from elsewhere does not necessarily betray itself, because inheritance is not the repetition of already settled meanings; inheritance is also the task of deciding what, within the inherited, has not yet been adequately understood. The foreign can therefore function as an interpretive disturbance through which dormant possibilities of the inherited become visible.

The French code is not simply brought into Iran; it becomes part of an argument through which Islamic normative resources are reread, reorganized, and activated under new historical conditions. The movement is circular rather than linear: Iran looks outward, encounters France, translates what it encounters, returns to its own tradition, discovers something newly intelligible within that tradition, and then emerges from the encounter not as France and not as the Iran that existed before the encounter, but as a tradition that has acquired another capacity for understanding itself. This circularity is the structure of adaptive re-coding, and it is also why the idea of legal borrowing is ultimately too weak to describe what is happening. Borrowing implies possession and transfer; re-coding implies transformation.

The metaphor of the open house is therefore more appropriate than the metaphor of transplantation. A house with no door cannot learn from what lies outside it, but a house whose doors are permanently removed ceases to possess any meaningful distinction between inside and outside. The legal tradition capable of learning is neither a fortress nor an empty container; it is a house with a door, and the existence of the door matters because it makes movement possible without abolishing distinction. The foreign can enter, but it must pass through a threshold. At that threshold, translation takes place. What enters the house is not necessarily identical with what leaves the house, because the house itself alters the meaning of what has entered.

This is why a legal order cannot simply copy another legal order even when its lawmakers sincerely desire to do so. The rule arrives carrying assumptions about personhood, authority, institutional competence, social relations, historical memory, and political legitimacy that may not correspond to the receiving order. The receiving tradition therefore has to interpret rather than reproduce. Its task is not to protect itself from all foreign influence, because such protection would amount to intellectual isolation, nor to surrender itself to foreign forms, because such surrender would amount to imitation, but to develop the capacity to metabolize difference. A healthy tradition, in this sense, is not one that remains unchanged; it is one that can encounter what it did not produce and incorporate the encounter without losing the ability to ask what incorporation means. The tradition remains itself precisely by becoming capable of becoming otherwise.

This is where the contemporary condition of Generation Z becomes philosophically important, because the structure of encounter that required Mustashar al-Dawleh to travel, observe, compare, and translate has been radically transformed by technology. Mustashar al-Dawleh had to move through diplomatic geography in order to encounter another institutional world; the contemporary body encounters multiple worlds without necessarily moving physically through them.

The distinction is not merely a matter of speed. Technology has altered the structure of embodiment itself. The body remains local, vulnerable, finite, and materially situated, but its perceptual and communicative capacities have become technologically distributed. A person can inhabit a conversation occurring thousands of kilometers away, observe a protest in another country while sitting in a bedroom, encounter a foreign legal institution before ever entering the jurisdiction in which it operates, watch the ordinary life of people governed by another legal order, compare institutional practices in real time, speak to strangers whose bodies occupy other political spaces, and carry these encounters back into the interpretation of the world immediately surrounding him.

The virtual body is therefore not the opposite of the physical body; it is the technological extension of embodied existence. It does not abolish location but multiplies the locations through which the body can receive and produce meaning. The body remains in Iran while becoming capable of participating in a field of perception that is not reducible to Iran. It remains physically singular while becoming socially and interpretively distributed. It is precisely this condition that makes the legal consciousness of Generation Z historically distinctive: the foreign is no longer an exceptional encounter produced by diplomatic travel, education abroad, or physical migration, because the foreign has become part of the everyday perceptual environment of the body.

The consequence for law is profound. If the body through which legal possibilities become visible is increasingly distributed across technological networks, then law can no longer be understood only as a territorial object encountered after the fact by citizens who happen to fall under its jurisdiction. Legal consciousness is increasingly produced through comparison before formal legal reform occurs. A person sees another way of organizing privacy, another conception of equality, another relation between citizen and state, another mechanism for holding institutions accountable, another arrangement of public space, another understanding of bodily autonomy, another method of regulating technology, another response to discrimination, or another way of imagining participation, and these encounters do not remain external information. They become materials from which the person begins to judge the world in which he actually lives.

The crucial legal event may therefore occur before legislation is drafted, before a court is petitioned, and before an institution recognizes a new claim, because the event begins when an embodied subject discovers that the world could be organized otherwise. The perception of another possibility is itself a transformation in the normative field. Law is not produced only when a legislature writes a statute; it is also produced through the ordinary interpretive activity by which people test the legitimacy of existing arrangements against possibilities that have become visible through experience.

This is particularly important for Generation Z because the technological environment in which this generation has matured has made comparative consciousness almost unavoidable. The world is not simply something that this generation reads about; it is something into which its body extends itself continuously. The foreign is therefore not a distant object but a persistent presence in the formation of judgment.

Yet this does not mean that everything encountered through technology should be incorporated into domestic law, and this distinction is essential. The argument is not that because the world has become smaller, every successful institution elsewhere should be imported, nor that global connectivity has rendered local history irrelevant. Such a conclusion would return us to precisely the model of imitation that adaptive re-coding is designed to reject.

The point is instead that the increased proximity of the world enlarges the repertoire of questions through which a society can interrogate itself. A foreign legal institution may reveal a problem that was previously invisible, expose an assumption that had appeared natural, provide a conceptual vocabulary for an experience that had lacked one, or demonstrate that an institutional arrangement believed to be inevitable is in fact contingent. The value of the foreign therefore lies not necessarily in its adoption but in its capacity to disturb the receiving order into self-reflection.

A society may encounter an institution and decide not to adopt it; it may discover that the historical conditions that produced it do not exist locally; it may translate its underlying function into a completely different institutional form; or it may find that its own inherited tradition contains resources capable of responding to the same problem in another way. All of these are forms of learning. Adaptive re-coding does not measure success by the degree of resemblance between two legal systems; it measures success by the degree to which an encounter increases the receiving tradition’s capacity to understand and transform its own problems.

This is why I understand legal adaptation through the practice of bricolage — creating with materials already at hand — not because law is an accidental collection of fragments, but because creation within a historical tradition rarely begins from an empty table. The practitioner works with materials that are already available, but the significance of those materials changes when they are placed in new relations. A fragment of an inherited concept may acquire a new function; a foreign institutional idea may be translated into a local vocabulary; a technological practice may expose a legal problem for which no existing category is sufficient; an old principle may become newly important because a new circumstance has made its latent meaning visible.

The resulting legal order is neither a pure continuation of the past nor an imitation of the foreign. It is assembled from elements that have passed through interpretation. The metaphor matters because it allows us to understand adaptation as a creative rather than merely receptive act. We do not simply receive the world; we construct a relation to it from the materials available to us, and in constructing that relation we also reconstruct ourselves. The pieces we choose, the pieces we refuse, the pieces we modify, and the relations we establish among them are themselves statements about what we understand our inheritance to mean. In this sense, bricolage is not the opposite of tradition; it may be one of the ways through which tradition remains alive. A tradition incapable of rearranging its materials eventually becomes a museum of forms, while a tradition capable of rearrangement can continue to generate meanings under circumstances its predecessors could never have anticipated.

Generation Z therefore enters legal thought not simply as a generation with different political preferences but as a generation whose embodied relation to the world changes the conditions under which legal learning occurs. Its members can be locally situated and globally exposed at the same time, physically constrained and virtually extended, historically inherited and continuously interrupted by encounters with other ways of living. This creates a peculiar legal subject whose expectations cannot be adequately explained by the traditional opposition between national and foreign, internal and external, and local and global.

The body of this subject is already a site of translation. It receives fragments of the world, compares them, tests them against lived experience, incorporates some, rejects others, and carries the remainder into the institutions of its own society. What appears externally as cultural mixture may therefore be understood more rigorously as an embodied process of normative re-coding. The Generation Z body is not merely consuming global information; it is continuously performing comparative judgment, and comparative judgment is one of the conditions from which legal consciousness emerges.

When a person asks why something that appears possible elsewhere is impossible here, when she notices that an institution can be organized differently, when he compares the treatment of a body, a relationship, a workplace, a public space, or a political claim across jurisdictions, the question has already become juridically significant even if it has not yet acquired the form of a legal claim. The body has encountered another possibility, and the legal order has therefore acquired a new problem.

This returns us to Mustashar al-Dawleh, but now in a way that makes the historical distance between his world and ours philosophically productive rather than merely chronological. He had a body that traveled. We have bodies that can travel without moving. He crossed geographical borders in order to encounter institutional difference; we cross informational and technological borders continuously while remaining physically located somewhere. He stood in Tiflis and saw a different order; we can see thousands of orders, practices, and forms of life through the distributed perceptual field of the network.

Yet the fundamental problem remains strangely recognizable. He looked at what he encountered and wished that something of its order might become possible in Iran. We do something structurally similar, although the speed, scale, and intimacy of the encounter have changed beyond recognition. The difference is that our problem is now more difficult because we encounter not one foreign world but an almost endless multiplicity of them, and because the task of choosing what to learn has become inseparable from the task of deciding who we are.

The abundance of foreign possibilities does not eliminate the need for tradition; it makes the interpretive capacity of tradition more important. The more worlds become available to the body, the more urgently the body needs a language through which those worlds can be compared, translated, and judged. Without such a language, global connectivity produces imitation; with it, connectivity can produce transformation.

The legal order of the future will therefore be shaped not only by legislators, judges, and constitutional designers but by the everyday embodied encounters through which people discover that their inherited arrangements are neither natural nor inevitable. This does not mean that formal institutions have become irrelevant. On the contrary, it means that institutions increasingly receive their pressure from a field of embodied comparison that precedes them.

The citizen of Generation Z does not encounter law only when she enters a courtroom or reads a statute. She encounters law when she compares the conditions of her own life with those of bodies elsewhere, when she sees how another jurisdiction recognizes or refuses a claim, when she experiences a platform whose rules govern conduct across borders, when she communicates with people subject to different legal regimes, and when these encounters alter her understanding of what ought to be possible.

The virtual body thus becomes one of the places in which the future of law is rehearsed before it is legislated. It is a juridical body not because every online action is legally significant, but because the networked extension of embodiment changes the field from which legal significance can emerge. The most important consequence of this argument is that the future lawmaker must learn to distinguish between copying an institution and understanding what the institution makes possible.

This distinction was already latent in Mustashar al-Dawleh’s method. When he looked toward France, he did not simply ask how France had become France; he asked what could be learned from the experience of another society without making the foreign society the measure of one’s own existence. His answer was not isolation but translation. He looked outward and then returned inward, and in returning inward he discovered that his own tradition could be reread in light of the encounter. This is precisely why his argument remains more interesting than a simple narrative of Westernization. The foreign became a means of asking the inherited a new question, while the inherited became a means of interpreting the foreign without surrendering to it.

Adaptive re-coding names this double movement: the foreign is transformed when it enters another normative language, but the receiving tradition is transformed as well because it can no longer understand itself exactly as it did before the encounter. The act of appropriation therefore changes both sides of the relation. What is appropriated is not merely an external object; it becomes part of a new configuration of meaning.

Perhaps this is what it means to say that law is a house whose door remains open. The open door does not mean that the house has no architecture. It means that architecture is not confused with immobility. A living legal tradition must possess enough continuity to recognize itself and enough openness to be disturbed. It must be capable of saying, when confronted by the foreign, neither “this is foreign and therefore false” nor “this is foreign and therefore superior,” but rather: what problem has this encounter revealed in us, what does the foreign institution actually do, what can its function mean within our own history, which parts of our inheritance can answer it, which parts must be revised, and what might our tradition become if it were capable of answering a question it had never previously been forced to ask?

This is the deeper sense in which the tradition itself demands adaptation. To inherit is not simply to preserve; it is to receive the responsibility of making the inherited intelligible under conditions that the ancestors did not inhabit. The demand for fidelity to tradition can therefore become, paradoxically, a demand for transformation, because refusing to transform a tradition when the world has changed may preserve its vocabulary while destroying its capacity to mean.

And perhaps this is why I keep returning to the bathroom with which I began. At the beginning, I was there alone, playing at being two presidents, turning my body into a theater of political identities that did not belong to it, moving between imagined worlds while the actual body remained seated in an ordinary room. It was easy to laugh at the scene because I believed there was a clear distinction between the imaginary political body and the physical body that performed it.

But the distinction has become harder to maintain. The body in that room is already connected to bodies elsewhere; it receives their words, their images, their fears, and their political possibilities, and it sends its own experience outward through the same technological networks that have made the foreign part of its immediate perceptual environment. I am not literally in every place to which my attention travels, but neither am I simply absent from them. My embodiment has acquired an extension that is neither wholly physical nor merely imaginary, and this extension is precisely where the contemporary legal problem begins.

I can learn from another jurisdiction without traveling to it; I can encounter another conception of law before it becomes a reform proposal; I can discover that an experience I considered private has a juridical language elsewhere; I can carry a foreign possibility back into the vocabulary of my own tradition; and, through that movement, I can participate in the production of a legal question that did not previously exist in the same form.

Yet the physical body remains there, stubbornly and vulnerably present, because no virtual extension can finally abolish the material fact of embodiment. The body that travels through networks can still be confined by walls, deprived of communication, exposed to violence, and, in the most terrible sense, exposed to a bullet. Perhaps the person sitting in the bathroom imagining himself to be a president is also, without knowing it, rehearsing something much closer to the truth: he is discovering that he is part of a body larger than himself, a distributed legal and political body whose different parts encounter different worlds, carry different wounds, and nevertheless remain capable of learning from one another.

The question is no longer whether the body in the bathroom belongs to Iran or to the world, because the technological condition of contemporary embodiment has made that opposition increasingly inadequate; the question is what this body will do with the world that has entered it, how it will distinguish imitation from learning, how it will turn encounter into interpretation, interpretation into adaptation, and adaptation into institutions capable of answering the problems that produced the encounter in the first place.

Mustashar al-Dawleh stood in Tiflis and looked toward Iran, wishing that what he had seen elsewhere might become possible at home; I stand in a bathroom and possess something he could not have possessed, a virtual body through which the world is already within reach, and yet the fundamental responsibility is unexpectedly similar. I too have to look, but looking is no longer enough. I have to translate what I see, test it against what I have inherited, discover what my own tradition can still become, and accept that the act of learning from the world may require me to change the very language through which I understand home.

The body in the bathroom is therefore not outside the argument about law; it is where the argument finally arrives, because law begins not only in parliaments and courts but in the embodied moment in which a person encounters another possibility and realizes, with the unsettling force of a crack appearing across the ceiling of a house in which he has always lived, that the world he inherited is not the only world that could exist, and that the responsibility of inheritance may consist precisely in deciding what to do with that knowledge.