How is monastic law practised in modern-day Sri Lanka? How do contemporary monastic jurists reckon with multi-legality? This chapter draws on archival and ethnographic research with Sri Lanka’s third-largest monastic community, the Rāmañña Nikāya, to answer these questions and explore the operation of monastic law today. It introduces readers to the Rāmañña constitution, court system, judicial training materials, jurisprudential texts and other features of monastic legal practice. It argues that monastic judges practise legal pluralism in ways that both resist and embrace the parallels between monastic and state law, engaging in a form of ‘double speak’ that, on the one hand, places monastic law ‘on the scale’ of Sri Lankan law while, at the same time, highlighting its superior, more-than-human status.

How should scholars and policymakers think about legal pluralism? In this Conclusion, I reflect on that topic, insisting that analysts should move beyond the question of whether laws, themselves, are or are not compatible. Instead, they should look at the practices of legal pluralism that make such compatibility seem natural or permissible, exceptional or impossible. I argue that inter-legal harmony is not a technical feat, but a social, political, and emotional achievement – one that is often precarious. Legal pluralism, therefore, implicates more than just the ‘stuff’ of law, but involves the shifting and recursive processes that help us to assemble normative worlds, reckon with diverse obligations, and find meaningful pathways forward through a changing and complex life.

How did colonialism affect the content and practice of Buddhist monastic law? This chapter answers this question from the perspective of colonial legal sources, considering the ‘practices of legal pluralism’ employed by British officials starting in the early 1800s. Drawing on colonial correspondence, court decisions, draft laws, government transcripts, and newspaper reports, I explain how and why the British concretised legal concepts, such as ‘ecclesiastical succession’, ‘Buddhist temporalities’ and ‘temple lands’, while also generating new bodies of law: a body of civil-court case law governing monks called Buddhist Ecclesiastical Law; and an influential ordinance regulating the use and administration of ‘Buddhist properties’, called the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance. I show how colonial jurists mapped Buddhism onto particular spaces, issues and communities, such that Buddhism acquired, in law, English-style qualities of jurisdiction across three dimensions: territorial jurisdiction, subject-matter jurisdiction, and personal jurisdiction.

Sri Lanka is the only Buddhist-majority country in the world without an official state-recognised monastic legal system. This is in spite of the fact that an entire section of the county’s constitution is dedicated to such a venture. How can one explain this? And why does Sri Lanka remain in this impasse? This chapter answers these questions by tracking a significant (and ongoing) series of attempts made by Sri Lanka’s leading intellectuals, educators, politicians, monks and legislators to ‘legalise’ monastic law (S: nītīgata kirīma) by creating some form of statute, tribunal or legal body that could blend monastic and state legal authority. Drawing on an un- and under-studied body of political and legal documents, it explains how a particular approach to legal pluralism – one motivated by a ‘purist’ approach to law – both motivated and sabotaged successive efforts to formally recognise monastic courts and constitutions in state law.

What is monastic law for? This chapter explores the goals of monastic law, beyond its concerns with regulation and governance. Drawing on ethnographic, archival and survey research, it examines the various ‘nonpositivist’ aims pursued by monastic jurists: preserving unity and unanimity (sāmaggi) among monks; maintaining discretion and protecting reputations; avoiding (further) conflict and identifying the root causes of strife; minimising judicial prejudice by eliminating the mental defilements (kilesa) that give rise to them; restoring offenders to the community by applying therapeutic sanctions; aligning the conduct of monks with the concerns of local laity and temple donors; and, most importantly, shortening saṃsāra and hastening nirvana. This chapter highlights the intertwining of positivist and nonpositivist elements in monastic law, shining light on a legal order that not only enforces standards of conduct but also impacts karma, saṃsāra and the path to nirvana.

What is Buddhist monastic law? How should one think about its key texts, institutions and principles? This chapter answers these questions in the context of Sri Lanka and other parts of South and Southeast Asia, focusing especially on ideas of unity and diversity in law. The first part of this chapter summarises key ideas and principles found in the ancient code of monastic law, the Vinaya Piṭaka, which is thought to be the cornerstone of monastic legal texts and practices. The second (longer) part of this chapter introduces readers to a range of monastic legal sources outside the Vinaya Piṭaka, which also play key roles in the practice of monastic law in contemporary Sri Lanka. These sources include commentaries, constitutions, handbooks, judicial manuals, statutes, case law, social expectations and other normative sources produced by monks, state officials and Buddhist laypersons.

Why do similar conditions of legal pluralism lead to conflict in one setting and compromise in another? This chapter addresses this question by approaching legal pluralism not as an empirical condition – a multiplicity of legal orders that individuals navigate – but as a set of practices that bring order, structure and meaning to the obligations, codes and norms that one confronts. Drawing on three relatively recent case studies, this chapter demonstrates how the same set of normative artefacts – the same texts, norms, institutions, and authorities – can be assembled, interpreted, and mobilised in profoundly divergent and even agonistic ways. The first case study involves a monk’s attempt to gain a driving license. The second involves the issuing of identity cards for Buddhist nuns (bhikkhunīs). The third relates to a parliamentary bill designed to recognise monastic constitutions (katikāvatas) in law.

How does the encounter between monastic law and colonial law look from the perspective of Buddhist monastics? The chapter offers an alternative legal history of the nineteenth century, drawing on a largely unstudied archive of Sinhala- and Pali-language legal sources written by Buddhist monks. Using these sources, I highlight the creativity and productivity of Buddhist monastic lawmaking during the nineteenth century. A close analysis of monastic legal texts from this period also reveals key differences in the ways that monastic jurists understood and enacted legal pluralism when compared with colonial officials. Rather than treating the laws of the Buddha and the laws of the Crown as conflicting, as the British tended to do, monastic jurists purposefully aligned them. Rather than hardening legal boundaries between monastic and colonial regulation, monastic jurists pushed in the direction of integration, borrowing and exchange between local and imported laws.

While later medieval England enjoyed an increasingly sophisticated array of governmental institutions that helped kings to rule, kingship itself remained a fundamentally personal and personality-driven enterprise. Consequently, space was needed where the ‘personal side’ of politics could take place and where each monarch’s domestic needs could be met. It was the royal court and household that provided space for both of these things. Despite the importance of each, defining them, and their relationship to one another, is not easy. The royal court (not to be confused with the courts of law, discussed in Chapter 6) has proven particularly problematic to historians because it lacked a clear structure or boundaries.

Chapter 5, Dull Instead of Light, examines regular practitioners’ increasing efforts to disambiguate “medicine” and “quackery” in the wake of the 1868 formulation of the Hicklin test of obscenity. The first section explores how medical groups experimented with using obscenity laws as alternatives to the Medical Act (1858) to regulate medical practice. These actions’ impact on the book trade is debatable, but regular practitioners’ tireless efforts to collapse quackery and obscenity influenced new legislation governing medical advertising. The rest of the chapter examines parallel efforts to professionalize medical publishing. In advocating for limitations on medical book advertising, the use of dry, technical language in medical writing, and other changes to medical print culture, regular practitioners further sought to disambiguate “medicine” from “quackery.” The lines between popular and professional medical works had previously been blurry. The changes examined in this chapter helped cleave a growing chasm between the kinds of sexual knowledge accessible to medical and non-medical audiences.

The US-driven and NGO-mediated prosecutorial approach to address trafficking prioritizes efforts to convict the accused and foregrounds victim-witness testimony as the central piece of evidence to do so. Though training rescued women to testify against alleged traffickers is thus a key component of donor-driven NGOs’ efforts, the author’s ethnographic research revealed that this is a rare occurrence. This chapter explores the multiple and complex reasons why most rescued women don’t testify, by situating them in the broader Indian sociolegal context. In juxtaposition, it tracks the case of a trafficked woman, Sunaina Das, who testified for the prosecution in a New Delhi trial court, to also explore the constellation of factors that lead some women to testify and the challenges they face. It follows Sunaina’s encounters with the Indian criminal justice system and the support she received from both NGOs and Indian legal actors. Finally, it explores how an NGO-led training session for Indian judges impacted her case. Through these contributions, this chapter challenges prevalent assumptions in global anti-trafficking campaigns about the victimhood of Global South sex workers, about criminal justice necessarily benefiting trafficked sex workers, and about the Indian criminal justice system necessarily lacking the ability to address sex trafficking.

An introductory chapter briefly outlines relevant historiography of courtier studies in general and analyses of elite female servants more narrowly. This introduction establishes important classifications of household servants and demonstrates how roles and terminology shifted over time as the royal court and household grew in both size and complexity over the course of the later Middle Ages. In addition to illuminating categories of female service, the introduction details the sources and methodology employed to produce this analysis of medieval English ladies-in-waiting, highlighting the goals, successes, and limits of this kind of prosopographical methodology. The introduction argues that an analysis of ladies-in-waiting offers insight into female social networks, gender dynamics at court, and issues of power, authority, and wealth, along with how women accessed these features, in late medieval society.

Chapter 4 explores the kinds of extraordinary situations experienced in the lives of royal ladies-in-waiting, asserting their prominent roles in coronations, marriages, christenings, and other ceremonies designed to cement and further dynastic prestige, such as Order of the Garter tournaments and the Field of Cloth of Gold extravaganza. Serving the queen at important life-cycle rituals, seasonal events, and diplomatic spectacles contributed to the monarchy’s propaganda program, thereby bolstering royal authority and encouraging dynastic loyalty. When kings dispatched their daughters and sisters to foreign lands, their entourages signaled the wealth and status of the English monarchy. Highborn female attendants not only assisted the queen and female royals, but also reinforced hierarchical order by their very placement in these rituals, order that was displayed, I argue, both in processions and their particular assigned responsibilities. This chapter reveals how the spectacle of such pageantry had significant political dimensions, even if such was not always recognized by the subjects who witnessed royal processions.

This chapter contains practical advice on how to write a statement for an inquest.

This chapter examines the kinds of legal procedure adopted by various ancient legal systems to conduct legal proceedings in a court. The areas covered include the constitution of courts, preliminary court proceedings, valid evidence, presentation and evaluation of evidence, and the final verdict, including the possibility of appeals. Discussions include judges and court personnel, the physical space of courts, distinctions between civil and criminal cases, plaint and plea, sureties, and legal representation. Under evidence there is examination of witnesses, documents, oaths, ordeals, torture for evidentiary purposes, and forensic investigation, and punishment for perjury. Once a verdict is reached by the court, there are issues relating to the recording and the enforcement of the verdict. There is wide diversity in the legal procedure recorded in the sources from different legal traditions. Some deal with the topic explicitly, while in others we have to deduce the procedure from material on court cases.