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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2015
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.
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 This article emerges from a presentation originally made by the writer at the Chiba Memorial Symposium: Towards a General Theory of Legal Culture in a Global Context, at the School of Law, SOAS, University of London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.
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