Coherent foreign collections and gifts

Now that we have all given thanks for our many blessings, shall we turn to gifts for which we are not always so thankful? Of course I am speaking of the gifts that we receive as librarians for our libraries. We can be a kind of food pantry of expired goods for the delayed generosity of our more senior academic patrons. Or, as is more problematic for my institution, the possible recipient of gifts of foreign law for jurisdictions we do not collect. In addition to the possible idea of just giving these to a collecting institution (which may not always be practical if there is a major shipping effort and cost involved), my question today is really this: can accepting random gifts from random jurisdictions, resulting in a spotty and incoherent collection, be only a bad thing or is there value in such gifts? Let us set aside partial runs of serials, which would not be acceptable, and think of continuing journal issue gifts or monographs. Would readers share their practices?