Legal Theory in the Colonies

In colonial India and Mandatory Palestine, early twentieth-century legal scholars made important contributions to the study of the nature of law, particularly by analyzing Hindu and Jewish law – their ancient religious systems. This book reconstructs the lives and ideas of these scholars, revealing a forgotten global wave of jurisprudential innovation that appeared across many territories in the non-Western world. The book challenges the view that non-Western legal scholars working in the colonies were passive recipients of Western ideas. It argues that Indian and Jewish thinkers used Western historical and sociological approaches to law to reimagine Hindu and Jewish law, and to assert their relevance to modern legal and constitutional debates. Though historical in scope, the story this book tells is also relevant to contemporary tensions between Western liberal law and non-Western religious legal traditions. This title is available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Assaf Likhovski is the Danielle Rubinstein Professor of Comparative Law and Jurisprudence at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine and Tax Law and Social Norms in Mandatory Palestine and Israel.