¹ In the Matter of Choo Eng Choon, Deceased (1908) 12 SSLR 120; extracted in Kum, Leong Wai, Family Law in Singapore: Cases and Commentary on the Women's Charter and Family law (1990), 106,275.Google Scholar

² R v Willans (1856) 3 Ky 16.

³ Bartholomew, GW, ‘English Law in Partibus Orientalibus’, ch 1 of AJ Harding (ed), The Common Law in Singapore and Malaysia (1985)Google Scholar; Phang, ABL, The Development of Singapore Law: Socio-Legal Perspectives (1990).Google Scholar

⁴ Chulas v Kolson (1867) Leic 462; In the Goods of Lao Leong An (1867) Leic. 418; In the Matter of Choo Eng Choon, Deceased (1908) 12 SSLR 120, 168–9. See, further, A Ibrahim, Towards a History of Law in Malaysia and Singapore (1992).

⁵ Ong Cheng Neo v Yap Kwan Seng (1897) 1 SSLR Supp 1; Law Reform (Marriage and Divorce) Act 1976.

⁶ The phrase ‘local knowledge’ is of course inspired by C Geertz, Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective (1980), and is used here very much in Geertz's sense. For further details of the case, see Kum, Leong Wai, ‘Common Law and Chinese Marriage Custom in Singapore’, in Harding (ed), The Common Law in Singapore and Malaysia (1985).Google Scholar

⁷ See, further, Bartholomew, above n 3.

⁸ Yeap Cheah Neo v Ong Cheng Neo (1875) LR 6 PC 381; ABL Phang, The Development of Singapore Law: Socio-legal Perspectives (1990), 55–6.

⁹ Hooker, MB (ed), Laws of South East Asia, vol.ii: European Laws in South East Asia (1988)Google Scholar; and see Coppell, CA, ‘The Indonesian Chinese as ‘Foreign Orientals’ in the Netherlands Indies’, ch 3 of T Lindsey (ed), Indonesia: Law and Society (1999).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Van Vollenhoven, , Het Adatrecht van Nederlandsche Indie, 3 vols (1918, 1931, 1933).Google Scholar

¹¹ Ahmad Ibrahim, above n 4.

¹² Leong Wai Kum, above n 6.

¹³ Ibrahim, Islamic Law in Malaysia (1965).

¹⁴ Leong Wai Kum, above n 6.

¹⁵ Marriage Law 1974; see Butt, S, ‘Polygamy and Mixed Marriage in Indonesia: the Application of the Marriage Law in the Courts’, ch 8 of T Lindsey (ed), Indonesia: Law and Society (1999)Google Scholar; Cammack, M, Young, L and Heaton, T., ‘Legislating Social Change in an Islamic Society—Indonesia's Marriage Law’, 44 Am Jo Comp Law 45 (1996).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Thailand Civil and Commercial Code, Book V (revd., 1976). North Vietnam modernised with its Marriage Law of 1960. In Philippines the global doctrine represented by the Spanish Civil Code of 1889 was modified so as to reintroduce some elements of local custom in 1950, and Muslim personal law was codified by the Code of Muslim Personal Laws 1977.

¹⁷ Re Ding Do Ca deceased [1966] 2 MLJ 220.

¹⁸ See further, MK Majid, Family Law in Malaysia (1999).

¹⁹ M Friedman, Chinese Family and Marriage in Singapore (1957). More generally, and especially on Thailand, see M Chiba, Asian Indigenous Law in Interaction with Received Law (1986).

²⁰ CGS Tan, ‘We are Registered: Actual Processes and the Law of Marriage in Singapore’, 13 Int Jo of Law, Policy and Fam. 1 (1999).

²¹ See Horowitz, D, ‘The Qu'ran and the Common Law: Islamic Law Reform and the Theory of Legal Change’ AJCL XLII (1994), 233 and 543CrossRefGoogle Scholar; MH Kamali, ‘Punishment in Islamic Law: a Critique of the Hudud Bill of Kelantan, Malaysia’, [1998] Arab Law Q 203; H Mutalib, Islam in Malaysia: From Revivalism to Islamic State (1993).

²² Pompe, S, ‘Mixed Marriages in Indonesia: Some Comments on the Law and the Literature’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, vols. 2e & 3e, 259 (1988)Google Scholar; Pompe, S, ‘A Short Note on Some Recent Developments with Regard to Mixed Marriages in Indonesia’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, vols 2e & 3e, 261 (1991)Google Scholar; Butt, above n 15.

²³ For legal transplants, see below at n 38 and text.

²⁴ MB Hooker (ed), Laws of South East Asia, vols i & ii (1988); and A Concise Legal History of South East Asia (1978).

²⁵ It is important to understand that this ‘layer’ still causes considerable debate: it is not mere legal history. A conference entitled ‘Legal Pluralism: the Role of Customary Law in Preserving Indigenous Heritage’ held in Kuching in Nov 1997 (see 25 Jo Mai Comp Law (1998); and another entitled ‘Customary Land Rights: Recent Developments’, held in Kuala Lumpur Feb 2000 (under the auspices of the Law Faculty, University of Malaya) dealt entirely with contemporary issues of customary law in several parts of SE Asia and Australasia and the accommodation between customary law and the ‘modern’ legal system.

²⁶ For these historical developments, see generally MB Hooker, ‘The Law Texts of Muslim South East Asia’, in Hooker, above n 24.

²⁷ B ter Haar, Adat Law in Indonesia, trans EA Hoebel and AA Schiller (1958); C van Vollenhoven, Het Adatrecht van Nederlandsche Indie, 3 vols (1918, 1931, 1933); M Koesnoe, Adat Law in Indonesia (1971).

²⁸ DS Lev, ‘The Lady and the Banyan Tree: Civil-Law Change in Indonesia’, AJCL, 14, 2 (1965) 282.

²⁹ See, eg, DS Lev, Islamic Courts in Indonesia (1972).

³⁰ MB Hooker, A Concise Legal History of South East Asia (1978); Laws of South East Asia, vol.ii: European Laws in South East Asia (1988); and Legal Pluralism: an Introduction to Colonial and Neo-colonial Laws (1975); Pohling Tan (ed), Asian Legal Systems: Law, Society and Pluralism in East Asia (1997). Using the terms in which the Glasgow Transmigration of Law Project analyses legal systems (ie, transitional, mixing, mixed jurisdictions, interrelated legal systems, evolving, continuous state, and redesigning state) SE Asian systems can be classified as ‘mixed jurisdiction’ systems, if one understands the categories correctly: see E Orucu, ‘Mixed and Mixing Systems: a Conceptual Search’, ch 20 of E Orucu, E Attwool, and S Coyle (eds), Studies in Legal Systems: Mixed and Mixing (1996).

³¹ Th Bakker, ‘Some Observations on the New Indonesian Company Law’, in AJ de Roo and RW Jagtenberg, Yearbook, Law and Legal Practice in East Asia 1996, vol 2, 203; B Tabaluja, ‘The New Indonesian Company Law’, 17:3 U Pa Jo Int Econ Law 883 (1996).

³² The terms are taken from C Geertz (ed), Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (1963).

³³ For evidence, see Trubek, D and Galanter, M, ‘Scholars in Self-estrangement: Some Reflections on the Crisis in Law and Development Studies in the United States’, Wisconsin Law Review 4, 1062 (1974)Google Scholar; Tamanaha, B, ‘The Lessons of Law-and-Development Studies’, 89 Am Jo Comp Law 470 (1995)Google Scholar. A recent study of East Asian law and development, K Pistor and P Wellons, The Role of Law and Legal Institutions in East Asian Economic Development, 1960–1995 (1999) is the first attempt (and a narrowly based one at that) to do justice in this area, but of SE Asian countries, it deals only with Malaysia. See also Yasuda, N, ‘Law and Development in the ASEAN Countries’, ASEAN Economic Bulletin, 10:2 (1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁴ G Teubner, Global Law Without the State (1997); Nelken, D, ‘Disclosing/Invoking Legal Culture’, Social and Legal Studies, 1995, 4, 435.Google Scholar D Nelken (ed) Comparing Legal Cultures (1996); Friedman, LM, ‘Borders: on the Emerging Sociology of Transnational Law’, 32 Stanford Jo Int Law 65 (1996).Google Scholar

³⁵ Anderson, B, ‘Old State, New Society: Indonesia's New Order in Comparative Historical Perspective’ Jo. Asian St 42, 3 (1983) 477.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁶ ILBS, Cyberlaws of Malaysia (1999). See also I Ariff and Goh Chen Chuan, Multimedia Supercorridor (2000), esp at 97–9.

³⁷ Above n 6.

³⁸ A Watson, Legal Transplants: an Approach to Comparative Law (1974); E Wise, ‘The Transplant of Legal Patterns’ AJCL 38 (Supp) (1990), 1.

³⁹ Bangkok Declaration 1967, Arts 2, 6.

⁴⁰ For some insights into existential angst among SE Asian legal scholars, see A Huxley, ‘Introduction’, in id, Thai Law: Buddhist Law: Essays on the Legal History of Thailand, Laos and Burma (1996), 3 et seq.

⁴¹ ‘Legal reception’ is unpacked by Orucu into: transplantation, migration, transfer, transposition, expansion, imposition, imposed reception, grafting, implantation, re-potting, fertilisation, cross-pollenisation, reciprocal influence, admiration, imitation, inspiration, inoculation, infiltration, penetration, adoption, assimilation, disgestion, absorption, extension, incorporation, engulfment, naturalisation, nationalisation, integration, reception (global, partial, eclectic, structural, strategic), crypto-reception, parallel development (independent, co-ordinated, concerted), satelisation, paralellisation, uniformisation, confrontation, emulation, melting pot, and salad bowl [or perhaps rojak: a hot, spicy, culturally mixed, Malay salad]: Orucu, above n 30. All of these can be applied to SE Asia.

⁴² Geertz, above n 6, at 226, said of Java, but it is true of SE Asia as a whole, that, ‘there is hardly a form of legal sensibility (African perhaps, or Eskimo) to which it has not been exposed.’

⁴³ Such is the cultural bias of modern Western education that in Europe there are barely any specialists in SE Asian law, and apart from SOAS, University of London (currently two academics interested in mainland and maritime SE Asia), and Leiden University's Van Vollenhoven Institute (heavy concentration on Indonesia but not on the other SE Asian countries), there are virtually no full-time researchers. Given the importance and population of the region (about 480m in 1998, increasing to about 700m in 2010, and therefore far larger than that of Europe), and the extraordinary growth of law therein, this situation is quite astonishing. By way of contrast, according to an unpublished internal SOAS paper by Tim Barrett (1999), there are 221 academics in the UK alone specialising in the Victorian novel. Unhappily the same type of bias against the study of foreign or comparative law is reflected in academic research in SE Asia itself. Australia, due its proximity to SE Asia, is better served, however, with Centres at Melbourne and Darwin as well as some activity elsewhere. US interest is confined to the East Asian Legal Studies Programmes at Harvard and Washington, Seattle. In ASEAN itself activity is confined to the Centre for ASEAN law and jurisprudence, Quezon City, and the Centre for Law and Development at Chulalongkorn University.

⁴⁴ Goff, Lord, ‘The Future of the Common Law’ 46 ICLQ 745, 747–8 (1997).Google Scholar

⁴⁵ See, further, CGS Tan, ‘Law and Legal Systems in South East Asia: Three Paths to a Viewpoint’, in PJ Davidson (ed), Trading Arrangements in the Pacific Rim–ASEAN and APEC (1999). The construction of ‘SE Asia’ has always been problematical. The term came into military usage in the Second World War (‘the Royal Navy uses the hyphen’, says DGE Hall, A History of South-East Asia (4th edn 1994), 1. Hyphenated or not, the region has cultural factors in common and is not a trade route nor a residual region in which Indian and Chinese culture have competed for dominance (‘Indonesia’, ‘Indo-China’, ‘Hinduised states’). The academic debates about the region's definition have in effect been rendered irrelevant by ASEAN, which settles the matters of both self-perception and international recognition.

⁴⁶ Mattei, U, ‘Three Patterns of Law: Taxonomy and Change in the World's Legal Systems’, AJCL, XLV, 1, 1997.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ The legal families approach oddly persists in identifying a family called ‘Asian law’ (see, eg, M van Hoecke, and M Warrington, ‘Legal Cultures, Legal Paradigms and Legal Doctrine: Towards a New Model for Comparative Law’ (1998) 47 ICLQ 495, and; in fact it would be extremely difficult according to this type of classification to place any SE Asian legal system within it, if indeed it exists at all. For a different approach to ‘Asian law’, see V Taylor (ed), Asian Laws Through Australian Eyes (1997).

⁴⁸ For a classic statement of the conservative view on this, see O Kahn-Freund, ‘On Uses and Misuses of Comparative Law’, 37:1 Mod Law Rev 1 (1974).

⁴⁹ See also W Ewald, ‘Comparative Jurisprudence (II): the Logic of Legal Transplants’ 43 Am Jo Comp Law 489 (1995).

⁵⁰ LW Pye and MW Pye, Asian Power and Politics: the Cultural Dimensions of Authority (1985); K Jayasuriya (ed), Law, Capitalism and Power in Asia: the Rule of Law and Legal Institutions (1999); K Jayasuriya, ‘The Rule of Law and Capitalism in East Asia’, 9:3 Pacific Review 367 (1996).

⁵¹ C Rose, ‘The “New” Law and Development Movement in the Post-Cold-War Era: a Vietnam Case-Study’ 32 Law & Soc Rev 93 (1998); see, further, Sidel, M, ‘The Re-emergence of Legal Discourse in Vietnam’, 43 ICLQ 163 (1994).Google Scholar

⁵² S Pompe, Indonesian Law 1949–1989: A Bibliography of Foreign-Language Materials with Brief Commentaries on the Law (1992).

⁵³ AJ Harding, Law, Government and the Constitution in Malaysia (1996); Lev, D, ‘Judicial Authority and the Struggle for an Indonesian Rechtsstaat’ 13 Law & Soc Rev 37 (1978)Google Scholar; Quinn, B, ‘Indonesia: Patrimonial or Legal State? The Law on Administrative Justice of 1986 in Socio-Political Context’, ch 18 of T Lindsey (ed), Indonesia: Law and Society (1999).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ No clearer example can be given than the running dispute (Sept 1998 to date) over the dismissal and trial of the Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. See also DS Lev, ‘Judicial Authority and the Struggle for an Indonesian Rechtsstaat’, Law and Society 13, Fall 1978, 37.

⁵⁵ For numerous Malaysian and Indian examples, see generally Rachagan, S Sothi and Jain, MP (eds), Public Interest Law (1998)Google Scholar. See also Millie, J, ‘The Tempo Case: Indonesia's Press Laws, the Pengadilan Tata Usaha Negara and the Indonesian Negara Hukum’, ch 19 of T Lindsey (ed), Indonesia: Law and Society (1999).Google Scholar

⁵⁶ B Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983).

⁵⁷ The term is used extensively in B Buzan and G Segal, Anticipating the Future (1998).

⁵⁸ eg, Maintenance of Parents Act 1993, Singapore.