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The Aborted Restoration of ‘Indigenous’ Law in India*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Marc Galanter
Marc Galanter
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Extract

Traditional law—Hindu, Muslim and customary—has been almost entirely displaced from the modern Indian legal system. Today, the classical dharmaśāstra component of Hindu law is almost completely obliterated. It remains the original source of various rules of family law. But these rules are intermixed with rules from other sources and are administered in the common-law style, isolated from śāstric techniques of interpretation and procedure. In other fields of law, dharmaśāstra is not employed as a source of precedent, analogy or inspiration. As a procedural-technical system of laws, a corpus of doctrines, techniques and institutions, dharmasastra is no longer functioning. This is equally true of Muslim law. 3 The local customary component of traditional law is also a source of official rules at a few isolated points, but it too has been abandoned as a living source of law.

Information

Type
Legal Cultures
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , January 1972 , pp. 53 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1972

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