1. INDIGENOUS UNOFFICIAL LAW
As clearly seen in the examples enumerated in the preceding chapter, various indigenous factors are adopted within the state legal system. From a legalistic point of view, they may be explained as having been adopted for their effectiveness and desirableness.
But the question arises: Why are they so effective and desirable? They are not simply factural practices, but must be approved and supported as being justified social norms. Indigenous factors adopted into official law concerning each example may not ordinarily be all the components of related social norms; part of them are selected, modified or reformulated by governmental policies of varying degrees.As a matter of course, the other factors that are not adopted may continue to function as social norms outside the realm of official law. Some or many of them may be conformable or indifferent to the effectiveness of official law, while others may function to supplement, compete with, modify or undermine state law, thus becoming unofficial law.
The validity of unofficial law is not discerned so definitely however, for, unlike that of state law, the source of the validity is not clearly identified or presented. The validity may originate, in one group of cases, in personal preference or judgement without any relevance to pressure from outside. Or in another group of cases, they may be effective by a blind choice without any conscious intention. But there may be yet another group of cases where they are “customarily sanctioned by a certain circle of people in popular conceptions and actual behaviour patterns.”
Unofficial law is in reality significant for the function of the state law, and can be conceptualized in terms of this significance. Its concept may not yet be furnished with the elaborated component variables sufficient to be used as a tool concept. It might be rather easy to define the word in a conceptual, logical work. But such a work may fall prey to the danger of excluding the real referents which must be described accurately by the concept, for the referents are not yet clearly observed. Furthermore, the referents may vary with localities, groups, time, cases, etc. What must be done first is to collect the materials which are thought to be relevant to the referents.