Legal And Moral Systems In Asian Customary Law

This book offers a comparative analysis of traditional Asian legal systems. It combines methods from legal history, legal anthropology, legal philosophy, and substantive law, pursuing a comprehensive approach that offers readers a broad perspective on the topic. The geographic regions covered include the Near East, Middle East, Central Asia, India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. For each region, the book first provides historical and political context. Next, it discusses major milestones in the region’s legal history and political institutions, as well as its forms of government. Readers are then presented with fundamental principles and terms needed to understand the legal arguments discussed. The book begins with the Ancient Near East and important topics such as Jewish law. The next part considers Islamic law, while also exploring modern issues. The third part focuses on Hindu and Buddhist law, while the fourth part covers China and Japan. The book’s closing section examines tribal societies, e.g. Mongols, Pashtuns and Malays. Topics covered include the interaction of legal systems within a legal circle, inter-systemic interactions, reasons for the failure and success of legal modernization, legal pluralism, and its effects on Asian societies. Family law, law of obligation, criminal law, and procedural law are also explored.

By the end of the eighth century A.D., imperial China had established a system of administrative and penal law, the main institutions of which lasted until the collapse of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1911. The Spirit of Traditional Chinese Law studies the views held throughout the centuries by the educated elite on the role of law in government, the relationship between law and morality, and the purpose of punishment. Geoffrey MacCormack's introduction offers a brief history of legal development in China, describes the principal contributions to the law of the Confucian and Legalist schools, and identifies several other attributes that might be said to constitute the "spirit" of the law. Subsequent chapters consider these attributes, which include conservatism, symbolism, the value attached to human life, the technical construction of the codes, the rationality of the legal process, and the purposes of punishment. A study of the "spirit" of the law in imperial China is particularly appropriate, says MacCormack, for a number of laws in the penal codes on family relationships, property ownership, and commercial transactions were probably never meant to be enforced. Rather, such laws were more symbolic and expressed an ideal toward which people should strive. In many cases even the laws that were enforced, such as those directed at the suppression of theft or killing, were also regarded as an emphatic expression of the right way to behave. Throughout his study, MacCormack distinguishes between "official," or penal and administrative, law, which emanated from the emperor to his officials, and "unofficial," or customary, law, which developed in certain localities or among associations of merchants and traders. In addition, MacCormack pays particular attention to the law's emphasis on the hierarchical ordering of relationships between individuals such as ruler and minister, ruler and subject, parent and child, and husband and wife. He also seeks to explain why, over nearly thirteen centuries, there was little change in the main moral and legal prescriptions, despite enormous social and economic changes.

First published in 1986. Western law is normally regarded as universal when considered from the fact that it has been received and utilized by non-Western countries as the basis of their own state legal systems. The reception of Western law by non-Western countries in modern times is the most influential encounter of non-Western law with foreign law. The major portion of this book is a collection of descriptions of typical non-Western countries from this viewpoint by native scholars.

Sets forth the evolution of Korea's law and legal system from the Chosǒn dynasty through the colonial and postcolonial modern periods.

XIV Seen as a whole, however, I regard the work before us to be especially noteworthy precisely because of its illumination of both the social contexts surrounding the law and the ideas which underlie the efforts towards criminal law reform. An analysis of this kind has not appeared until now, to my knowledge, even in the German literature on the subject, so that this book is of great value to ·the German reader as well as the American. B. Particulars In Chapter IV: A the authors give a general introduction into the development of the German criminal law reform. In that connection they recognize the special role of the Christian Democratic (CDU), Socialist (SPD) coalition in the political situation [leading to passage of the reform law]. The authors emphasize the importance of the introduction of a uniform prison sentence [that is to say ·the termination of the distinction between kinds of prison sentences] and the elimination of short term prison sentences, as the main points of the reform in the "general part" of the code. They remark (pages 170; 192) that a uniform concept of the goal of punishment is still lacking, although, when all is said, there is a general agreement on the principle of resocialization.