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The Difference that Religion Makes: Transplanting Legal Ideas from the West to Japan and India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2015

Prakash SHAH
Prakash SHAH*
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University London, United Kingdomprakash.shah@qmul.ac.uk
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Abstract

What is the fate of legal transplants when they arrive from one culture to another? Using the theoretical framework of legal transplantation developed by Masaji Chiba and the theory of religion developed by S.N. Balagangadhara the problem is tested with two different types of indigenous law, in Japan and India, which do not have religion. When certain kinds of legal ideas, embedded as norms within the Western culture, which is constituted by a religion, Christianity, enter non-Western cultures that do not have religion, those ideas break down, become distorted, absurd or nonsensical, and induce conflict. The secular state engages in the process of suppressing what it implicitly regards as false religion or idolatrous practices. As Chiba foresaw, this process can even lead to the identity postulate of a legal culture being altered or destroyed.

Type
Articles
Information
Asian Journal of Comparative Law , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , July 2015 , pp. 81 - 97
Copyright
© National University of Singapore, 2015 

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Footnotes

*

LL.B. (LSE); LL.M. (LSE); Ph.D. (SOAS). Currently Reader in Culture and Law. This article emerges from a presentation originally made by the writer at the Chiba Memorial Symposium: Towards a General Theory of Legal Culture in a Global Context, at the School of Law, SOAS, University of London 26 March 2012. I wish to thank Jakob de Roover and Yuka Takagi for their helpful comments, while all errors are mine.

References

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8. Ibid. Chiba similarly distanced himself from other concepts such as ‘customary law’ and ‘positive law’ because he found them too linked to the Western culture. For a deeper discussion of the specificity of Western jurisprudence, which Western scholars have hardly taken note of, see ibid. at 27-56.

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Freedom of religion is guaranteed to all. No religious organization shall receive any privileges from the State, nor exercise any political authority. No person shall be compelled to take part in any religious act, celebration, rite or practice. The State and its organs shall refrain from religious education or any other religious activity.

The Constitution of Japan, art. 20. In the relevant part, the First Amendment to the United States Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”. The Constitution of the United States of America, amend. I.

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61. Quoted in ibid. at 102.

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