![]() The current legal infrastructure in the People’s Republic of China was heavily influenced by soviet Socialist law, which essentially inflates administrative law at the expense of private law rights. Today Taiwanese law retains the closest affinity to the codifications from that period, because of the split between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists, who fled there, and Mao Zedong’s communists who won control of the mainland in 1949. Similarly, traditional Chinese law gave way to westernisation towards the final years of the Qing dynasty in the form of six private law codes based mainly on the Japanese model of German law. ![]() This partly reflected Germany’s status as a rising power in the late nineteenth century. ![]() Japan was the first country to begin modernising its legal system along western lines, by importing bits of the French, but mostly the German Civil Code. The eastern Asia legal tradition reflects a unique blend of secular and religious influences. Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Hong Kong also adopted the common law. After British colonialism, Hindu tradition, along with Islamic law, was supplanted by the common law when India became part of the British Empire. ĭuring the Muslim conquests in the Indian subcontinent, sharia was established by the Muslim sultanates and empires, most notably Mughal Empire’s Fatawa-e-Alamgiri, compiled by emperor Aurangzeb and various scholars of Islam. Manu’s central philosophy was tolerance and pluralism, and was cited across South East Asia. The Arthashastra, dating from the 400 BC, and the Manusmriti from 100 BCE were influential treatises in India, texts that were considered authoritative legal guidance. Library of Congress, Wikimedia CommonsĪncient India and China represent distinct traditions of law, and had historically independent schools of legal theory and practice. The Constitution of India is the longest written constitution for a country, containing 444 articles, 12 schedules, numerous amendments and 117,369 words. Yet Ancient Greek law contained major constitutional innovations in the development of democracy. The most intact copy of these stelae was discovered in the 19th century by British Assyriologists, and has since been fully transliterated and translated into various languages, including English, German and French.Īncient Greek has no word for “law” as an abstract concept, retaining instead the distinction between divine law ( thémis), human decree ( nomos) and custom ( díkē). Hammurabi placed several copies of his law code throughout the kingdom of Babylon as stelae, for the entire public to see this became known as the Codex Hammurabi. Around 1760 BC, King Hammurabi further developed Babylonian law, by codifying and inscribing it in stone. By the 22nd century BC, Ur-Nammu, an ancient Sumerian ruler, formulated the first extant law code, consisting of casuistic statements (“if… then…”). Early Ancient LawĪncient Egyptian law, dating as far back as 3000 BC, was based on the concept of Ma’at, and was characterised by tradition, rhetorical speech, social equality and impartiality. By analysing case outcomes, transaction costs, and numbers of settled cases, they have begun an analysis of legal institutions, practices, procedures and briefs that gives a more complex picture of law and society than the study of jurisprudence, case law and civil codes can achieve. Such legal historians have tended to analyse case histories from the parameters of social-science inquiry, using statistical methods, analysing class distinctions among litigants, petitioners and other players in various legal processes. They have looked at legal institutions as complex systems of rules, players and symbols and have seen these elements interact with society to change, adapt, resist or promote certain aspects of civil society. Twentieth-century historians viewed legal history in a more contextualised manner – more in line with the thinking of social historians. Certain jurists and historians of legal process have seen legal history as the recording of the evolution of laws and the technical explanation of how these laws have evolved with the view of better understanding the origins of various legal concepts some consider legal history a branch of intellectual history. Legal history is closely connected to the development of civilisations and operates in the wider context of social history. Legal history or the history of law is the study of how law has evolved and why it has changed. Looking at legal institutions as complex systems of rules, players and symbols interacting with society. Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, The Netherland, AHE, Creative Commons. 19th Dynasty copy of the Ipuwer Papyrus (known as The Lamentations of Ipuwer or The Admonitions of Ipuwer) in which a Middle Kingdom scribe laments the depths to which the country of Egypt has fallen.
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