The Evolution of Law and Society in Asia
The field of law and society has expanded dramatically in Asia in the early twenty-first century, making the region a focal point for innovation in methods and theory. Along with the publication of hundreds of books and articles and the establishment of dozens of centers, institutes, and graduate programs dedicated to the study of Asian law and society, new Asia-focused scholarly journals have also been launched, and new professional associations have emerged alongside older associations of long standing.
Hundreds of young, highly trained scholars have joined a prior generation of Asian law and society specialists to push the frontiers of research in new directions. Exciting findings based on fieldwork in Asia test old theories and generate new ones.Admittedly, legal education in most Asian countries - like legal education elsewhere in the world - remains largely traditional, focusing narrowly on black letter law, legal theory, and rule memorization. Nevertheless, the social, economic, and political transformations underway throughout Asia have made it increasingly clear that conventional legal scholarship is no longer adequate to prepare lawyers, judges, and policymakers to succeed in this new social and economic environment. Changing times demand new approaches that are both wider and deeper than the old ones. The broad, interdisciplinary perspective of law and society has become more compelling than ever.
During this same period, the field of law and society has flourished worldÂwide, but it would be a mistake to regard Asian law and society strictly as a foreign import - yet another transplant from Europe or North America. Of course, global influences have been and remain important. But the field of law and society also has deep roots in Asia reaching back in some cases more than a century. Asian scholars and western scholars working in Asia have played an important part in the development of law and society as an interÂnational research field, both as researchers and as leaders in international scholarly associations.
The history of Asian law and society should be mapped not as a wave of influence traveling from Global North to Global South but as a number of tributaries flowing from many Asian countries and from outside the region that have joined quite recently into a single broad river.Consider, for example, the rather different law and society origin stories in four Asian countries: Japan, Indonesia, China, and India. Japan is home to the world's oldest law and society association, The Japanese Association of Sociology of Law (JASL), which was founded in 1947. Japanese law and society first took shape during the early years of the twentieth century, following the establishment of the “modern” Japanese legal regime based on European models. The contrast between traditional Japanese law ways and the new legal system attracted the interest of Japanese legal scholars, particularly Izutaro Suehiro, who drew on the work of Eugen Ehrlich (1936) and Roscoe Pound (1910) in his efforts to study the “living law” from a sociological perspective rather than simply analyzing the new written laws on their own terms. Suehiro and other Japanese scholars conducted fieldwork in China and Japan to ascertain the “effective social norms that people actually complied with as rules of conduct” (Murayama 2013:569). After World War II, a new generation of scholars, most notably Takeyoshi Kawashima and Masaji Chiba, continued these efforts. In this intellectual climate, law and society studies became institutionalized in Japan, not only by the formation of the JASL but also by the designation of sociology of law as “a major subject of law study even after the establishment of the new professional law schools” (Murayama 2013:581).
The emergence of law and society in Indonesia followed a very different path. Cornelis van Vollenhoven, an eminent Dutch anthropologist, conÂtended that the Dutch colonial government needed a better understanding of Indonesian customary law, since “[misunderstanding its character led to illegal expropriation of land and other resources” (von Benda-Beckmann and Turner 2018:257).
Accordingly, he inspired a generation of researchers to conduct fieldwork studies of “local laws” in Indonesia and their sometimes conflictual relationship to the colonial legal superstructure - similar to efforts by anthropologists in other societies that fell under the control of European imperialists. Thus, research by scholars of Indonesia in the so-called Adat School should be understood as a product of colonialism and also, at least to some extent, as a check on its transgressions. After the Netherlands relinquished control over Indonesia in 1949, a few Indonesian scholars - such as Tapi Omas Ihromi and Satjipto Rahardjo - continued to conduct research and train younger scholars in the law and society tradition, but the most important scholarship continued to be produced by non-Indonesians, such as DanielS. Lev, Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, and Adriaan Bedner.
Law and society in China followed yet another trajectory, with little activity apparent in the earlier years of the twentieth century (except for the seminal work of Tung-Tsu Chu [1965]) but a dramatic efflorescence in the 1980s and 1990s. As the Chinese government began to support sociolegal research, two major conferences were held in Beijing in 1987 and 1988, and the translation into Chinese of classic and contemporary law and society studies, mostly from Europe and North America, made them available to a growing number of eager young Chinese students and scholars (Liu and Wang 2015). Fieldwork-based research began to appear in the 1990s, largely focused on rural Chinese settings; and major centers of teaching and research emerged afterward. Of considerable symbolic importance, one of the first sociolegal conferences that led to the founding of the Asian Law and Society Association took place at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which also became the home of the Asian Journal of Law and Society, published by Cambridge University Press since 2014. The story of law and society in China is, therefore, one of dramatic and quite recent expansion, supported by the Chinese government and led by a few particularly influential figures, such as Suli Zhu and Weidong Ji.
Law and society in India developed in quite a different way. British colonial administrators, like the Dutch colonizers in Indonesia, did engage in research on customary law and traditional Indian religious traditions, particularly Hinduism. Nevertheless, Srinivas (1987) and others have noted that preÂindependence research in the social sciences was hardly robust, and it was not until the post-independence period that social science research began to expand. In large part, this was because the new political leaders believed that a modern democratic state required good social science research in order to make sound policy decisions. Nevertheless, the Indian Council of Social Science Research showed little interest in law and society studies, although it did support some topics that we might consider sociolegal in nature, such as the study of social class, women, and rural poverty. Ironically, in light of the general neglect of law and society research in post-independence India, one of the world's leading law and society scholars at that time - Upendra Baxi - was Indian, and some of the most influential American and European law and society scholars of the late twentieth century were Indian specialists: Marc Galanter, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph and Lloyd Rudolph, Robert Kidder, and J. Duncan M. Derrett, among others. In recent years, however, Indian and other South Asian scholars, notably Pratiksha Baxi and her colleagues, have promoted law and society scholarship within India and South Asia by organÂizing a highly successful organization, known as LASSnet (Law and Social Sciences Research Network), based at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University. LASSnet meets every two to three years and attracts hundreds of scholars from the region.
It is evident from these four illustrative examples that law and society has emerged in very different ways in different Asian countries - and in a few countries it has scarcely emerged at all. Western intellectual influences have been important, and colonialism played a key role in some instances, but scholars in Asia themselves deserve most of the credit for nurturing the study of law and society and applying it to the circumstances of Asian societies. Indeed, they were the ones who realized that law and society research was uniquely suited to grapple with the rapidly changing conditions in Asia, first to study the ripple effects of legal “modernization” and then to study the consequences of globalization and tumultuous political and economic change. Many have recognized that law and society research can provide a reliable foundation for policy decisions now facing Asian societies. Traditional legal education, with its narrow focus on doctrine, is clearly not up to the task.
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