This article will be a discussion of the reception of Western law in an Eastern country, the problem of indigenous legal elements in the legal system of a non-Western culture, and the relationship between the indigenous elements and the received elements in the legal system.
In the nineteenth century, with the expansion of European economic, political and military powers, we saw the two great legal systems of Europe, Common Law and Civil Law, received in most of the countries of the other world, either voluntarily or involuntarily.
With the reception of Western law, problems arose concerning the relationship between the received elements and the role of jurisprudence in the receiving countries. In discussing these problems, one has to guard against the deeply ingrained concepts and categories of the Western jurisprudence, lest one should be accused of producing treatises “suitable for a manual of an ethnocentric political science rather than for comparative law” (Hooker, 1978: 32). As preconceived ideas and categories are harmful to scholarly investigation, a well-arranged conceptual scheme is indispensable for accurate analysis. We shall first attempt to lay out such a scheme.
More on the topic This article will be a discussion of the reception of Western law in an Eastern country, the problem of indigenous legal elements in the legal system of a non-Western culture, and the relationship between the indigenous elements and the received elements in the legal system.:
- This article will be a discussion of the reception of Western law in an Eastern country, the problem of indigenous legal elements in the legal system of a non-Western culture, and the relationship between the indigenous elements and the received elements in the legal system.
- Chiba Masaji (ed.). Asian Indigenous Law: In Interaction with Received Law. Routledge,2013. — 430 p., 2013