Notes

1 The summaries which follow are limited by my own ability to understand the reports from other cultures on the one hand, and by the specific intention here to verify the two working hypotheses stated in the Introduction.

2 Cf. Jhering's noted statement that Roman law ruled over the known world at three different times in human history, that is, through the unification of the Roman Empire, the unity of the Catholic Church, and the reception of Roman Law (Jhering, 1965: 3–5; italics mine).

3 The author of the Iranian report is a political scientist who was educated in The United States and is presently teaching in Saudi Arabia after having worked at Teheran University. The author of the Egyptian report is a legal scientist who has worked at a national research institute.

4 The first foreign culture diffused into the Sri Lankan native culture was the Indian culture, which brought Buddhism. The two cultures amalgamated to such an extent as to form what may be characterized as an indigenous culture. The second foreign culture, Islam, formed a minority group abiding by Islamic law. The third, Christianity, eventually brought Western law into the country by three agents: Portugal, which left rare influences in law; Holland, which left unique influences in the present “Roman-Dutch law;” and England, which exerted decisive influences upon contemporary official law. After independence, the country chose a socialist system. Sri Lanka, then, is a rare example, and may be the most complicated example of reception of law in the world.

5 The information on these tribal laws, although a secondary one based on the field surveys of some anthropologists, is of high value, because the tribal law of mountain peoples living in the vast area ranging from India, through Burma and Thailand, to the Indo-Chinese Peninsula has been sparsely reported, in spite of a significance comparable to the tribal laws of well-noted areas in Africa, North America, and Oceania.

6 There is a good example in point. Thailand has had a well-formalized constitution, but it was wholly or partially revised almost every time a cabinet was replaced, usually by coup d’état. Such frequent revisions of constitutions never occur in Western countries. In fact, Thai people tend not to take such a revision as an alteration of the basic norm of the nation, but rather as a natural course of revision of a kind of administrative law subject to the unwritten, unalterable fundamental norm of the nation.

7 This is not to say that Sri Lanka has no conspicuous unofficial law. On the contrary, various kinds of unofficial law exist, as suggested in Note 9. They are simply unobserved by the Sri Lankan author.

8 The positive provisions which are referred to in the Thai report as directly related to Buddhism are very few, even though the constitution, however frequently it has been revised, has continued to declare that the King, protector of all religions, must be a Buddhist.

9 The Moslems in Sri Lanka enjoy abiding by Islamic law, the important part of which is officially sanctioned along with some other indigenous laws, including ones for the Buddhist Sinhalese and the Hindu Tamils (for further details, see Tambiah, 1972: 143–225).

10 We have no apt references which systematically concentrate on this point, although recent reports on conflict management from non-Western societies include useful data on it. Some of them can be found in Allott and Woodman (1985).

11 POSTSCRIPT: After I completed the Conclusion, I personally devised another scheme, “three dichotomies of law” to improve on “the three-level structure of law.”

First, law may be official law which is “the legal system and its components sanctioned by the legitimate authority of a country”, or unofficial law which is “the legal system and its components which are not officially sanctioned by any legitimate authority but sanctioned in practice by the general consensus of a certain circle of people, whether within or beyond the bounds of a country, and which present distinct influences upon the effectivity of official law, supplementing, opposing, modifying or even undermining any of the official law, especially state law”. Second, law may be in the form of positive rules which are “the formalised verbal expressions of particular regulations to designate specified patterns of behavior”, or postulative values which are “particular values and ideas and their systems specifically connected with a particular law to ideationally found, justify, or else supplement, criticize the existing positive rules”. Finally, law may be indigenous law, “law originated in the native culture of a people”, or transplanted law, “law transplanted by people from other cultures, whether voluntarily received or involuntarily imposed”. (Cf. Chiba, 1984: 17–20)