The same economic base can be legally expressed differently to different effect across countries.

Evidence

Engels echoed this sentiment when, in Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy , in a long and interesting section on the state, law, and ideology, he shows how England retained the forms of the old feudal law, while giving them a bourgeois content: how Roman Law provided the foundation for the evolution of bourgeois legal relations elsewhere; how this “working up into a special code of law” proved to be a poor basis for the development of Prussia, but—transformed into the Code Civil —an extremely favorable one for France. Thus, though “bourgeois legal rules merely express” the economic life conditions of society in legal form, they can do so well or ill according to circumstances. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 512

Categorization

• XREF: The idea that the same economic base can be ‘expressed well or ill’ in legal form connects to Milgrom’s work on how institutions vary in how efficiently they support trade.
• DEFINE: This concretizes the ‘articulation’ concept — how an economic fact must ‘assume the form of juristic motives’ to become part of the superstructure.