Research Project

Custom and Comparative Legal History

This project sets forth the evolution of custom as a source of law in European and East Asian history. The concept of customary law was key machinery, across time and space, in reconciling the pre-existing legal order with a new legal system from outside. Its function in receiving foreign law has plenty of precedents in European history, for example in late medieval France in the wake of the revival of Roman law. Similar developments took place in East Asia in the late nineteenth century, as Meiji Japan adopted the notion of custom as law from Europe in the process of transforming its traditional laws and popular practices into modern law and also of integrating the laws of its colonies into the state legal structure. On the global imperial scene, custom referred to virtually anything that was not part of the colonizer’s legal universe, but the actual course of policy varied widely, affected by each power‘s conception of its enterprise in the overseas venture. Custom offers a rare analytical instrument through which one can compare different legal pasts side by side, with attention to the premises and postulates of the individual countries’ legal developments as well as the historical forces that brought them into contact with one another. A synthetic comparative study of custom can enrich our analytical framing of legal pluralism in history.