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.

China’s rise has aroused apprehension that it will revise the current rules of international order to pursue and reflect its power, and that, in its exercise of State sovereignty, it is unlikely to comply with international law. This book explores the extent to which China’s exercise of State sovereignty since the Opium War has shaped and contributed to the legitimacy and development of international law and the direction in which international legal order in its current form may proceed. It examines how international law within a normative–institutional framework has moderated China’s exercise of State sovereignty and helps mediate differences between China’s and other States’ approaches to State sovereignty, such that State sovereignty, and international law, may be better understood.

Recently scholars have become increasingly aware that the study of Chinese law can provide new insight into the forces actually at work in Chinese society in different epochs. In an effort to encourage and facilitate the study of this subject, the thirteen essays of this volume deal with the methodology of studying the legal system of the People's Republic, describe the available research materials, and analyze the problems presented in making the materials of Chinese law intelligible to Western readers. They also review foreign works on Chinese law and explore the difficulties involved in translation and in comparing the Chinese system to our own and to that of the Soviet Union. Mr. Cohen's thoughtful introduction provides an excellent survey of the worldwide development of studies of Chinese law. It also delineates the nature of the essays that he and the eleven other scholars have contributed to the volume.