Legal Theory in Colonial India and Mandatory Palestine

This talk explores overlooked works on legal theory written by scholars working in two colonial territories, British India and Mandatory Palestine, in the first decades of the 20th century. Drawing on their studies of Hindu and Jewish law, scholars working in these territories made significant contributions to our understanding of the nature of law and its history. Current accounts of the history of modern legal theory are overwhelmingly Eurocentric, and the story that I tell fills a significant gap in our understanding of how modern legal philosophy developed globally. Studying the ideas of colonial legal scholars also offers lessons relevant to current cultural and political debates, because it reveals an early phase of the attempt by non-Western scholars to reconcile Western liberal law with the norms and values of non-Western religious legal traditions.