This book offers a comparative analysis of traditional Asian legal systems. It combines methods from legal history, legal anthropology, legal philosophy, and substantive law, pursuing a comprehensive approach that offers readers a broad perspective on the topic. The geographic regions covered include the Near East, Middle East, Central Asia, India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. For each region, the book first provides historical and political context. Next, it discusses major milestones in the region’s legal history and political institutions, as well as its forms of government. Readers are then presented with fundamental principles and terms needed to understand the legal arguments discussed. The book begins with the Ancient Near East and important topics such as Jewish law. The next part considers Islamic law, while also exploring modern issues. The third part focuses on Hindu and Buddhist law, while the fourth part covers China and Japan. The book’s closing section examines tribal societies, e.g. Mongols, Pashtuns and Malays. Topics covered include the interaction of legal systems within a legal circle, inter-systemic interactions, reasons for the failure and success of legal modernization, legal pluralism, and its effects on Asian societies. Family law, law of obligation, criminal law, and procedural law are also explored.

The study of Asia and its plural legal systems is of increasing significance, both within and outside Asia. Lawyers, whether in Australia, America or Europe, or working within an Asian jurisdiction, require a sound knowledge of how the law operates across this fast-growing and diverse region. Law and Legal Institutions of Asia is the first book to offer a comprehensive assessment of eleven key jurisdictions in Asia - China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam, Singapore and the Philippines. Written by academics and practitioners with particular expertise in their state or territory, each chapter uses a breakthrough approach, facilitating cross-jurisdictional comparisons and giving essential insights into how law functions in different ways across the region and in each of the individual jurisdictions.

This book explores the legal culture of the Parsis, or Zoroastrians, an ethnoreligious community unusually invested in the colonial legal system of British India and Burma. Rather than trying to maintain collective autonomy and integrity by avoiding interaction with the state, the Parsis sank deep into the colonial legal system itself. From the late eighteenth century until India's independence in 1947, they became heavy users of colonial law, acting as lawyers, judges, litigants, lobbyists, and legislators. They de-Anglicized the law that governed them and enshrined in law their own distinctive models of the family and community by two routes: frequent intra-group litigation often managed by Parsi legal professionals in the areas of marriage, inheritance, religious trusts, and libel, and the creation of legislation that would become Parsi personal law. Other South Asian communities also turned to law, but none seems to have done so earlier or in more pronounced ways than the Parsis.

The Roman Empire was based on law, and it was vital for rulers and ruled that laws should be understood. They were often given permanent form in stone or bronze. This book transcribes, translates, and fully illustrates with photographs, the inscription (more than 155 lines, in its damaged state) that carries the regulations drawn up over nearly two centuries for the customs dues of the rich province of Asia (western Turkey). The regulations, taken from Roman archives, were set up in Greek in Ephesus, and the book provides a rendering of the text back into Latin. The damaged text is hard to restore and to interpret. Six scholars offer line-by-line commentary, and five essays bring out its significance, from the Gracchi to Nero, for Rome's government and changing attitudes towards provincial subjects, for the historical geography of the Empire, for its economic history, and for the social life of Roman officials.

Previous editions published : 2nd (2004) and 1st (2000).

The specially commissioned papers in this book lay a solid theoretical foundation for comparative legal history as a distinct academic discipline. While facilitating a much needed dialogue between comparatists and legal historians, this research handbook examines methodologies in this emerging field and reconsiders legal concepts and institutions like custom, civil procedure, and codification from a comparative legal history perspective.

This is a concise history and analysis of the civil law tradition, which is dominant in most of Europe, all of Latin America, and many parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. This new edition deals with recent significant events - such as the fall of the Soviet empire and the resulting precipitous decline of the socialist legal tradition - and their significance for the civil law tradition.

The Asian Yearbook of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law aims to publish peer-reviewed scholarly articles and reviews as well as significant developments in human rights and humanitarian law. It examines international human rights and humanitarian law with a global reach, though its particular focus is on the Asian region. The focused theme of Volume 6 is Essays in Honour of Professor Shaheen Sardar Ali.

An Introduction to Court Interpreting has been carefully designed to be comprehensive, accessible and globally applicable. Starting with the history of the profession and covering the key topics from the role of the interpreter in the judiciary setting to ethical principles and techniques of interpreting, this text has been thoroughly revised. The new material covers: remote interpreting and police interpreting; role-playing scenarios including the Postville case of 2008; updated and expanded resources. In addition, the extensive practical exercises and suggestions for further reading help to ensure this remains the essential introductory textbook for all courses on court interpreting

The primary aim of this book is to provide clear and reliable information on a number of central topics in comparative law. At a time when global society is increasingly mobile and legal life is internationalized, the role of comparative law is gaining importance. While the growing interest in this field may well be attributed to the dramatic increase in international legal transactions, this empirical parameter is only part of the explanation. The other part, and (at least) equally important, has to do with the expectation of gaining a deeper understanding of law as a social phenomenon and a fresh insight into the current state and future direction of one’s own legal system. In response to the internationalization of legal practice and theory, law schools around the world have expanded their comparative law programs. Within the legal subjects that form the core of the curriculum there is a greater interest in comparative legal analysis, as well as greater attention to how global developments and international actors and institutions affect domestic law. Transnational legal education based on comparative reasoning is intended to help shape a new generation of lawyers, public servants and other professionals who recognize and respect cultural diversity in an interconnected world. The central topics discussed in this book include: the nature and scope of comparative legal inquiries; the relationship of comparative law to other fields of legal study; the aims and uses of comparative law; the origins and historical development of comparative law; and the evolution and defining features of some of the world’s predominant legal traditions. It also deals with selected theoretical aspects, such as the problem of comparability of legal events; the classification of legal systems into families of law; and the topics of legal transplants, harmonization and convergence of laws. Chiefly intended for students, the book also discusses a number of fundamental issues concerning the development of comparative law, and devotes certain sections to reviewing the salient features of the relevant literature on definitional, terminological, methodological and historical issues.