10.1111/j.1540-5893.2009.00367.x">
 

Landscapes of the Law: Injury, Remedy, and Social Change in Thailand

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2009

Abstract

This article explains why, in a rapidly changing Asian society, tort law surprisingly plays a diminished role. Sociolegal theorists since Weber have postulated that state law operates by interacting with and responding to non-state legal orders. In Thailand, for much of the twentieth century the state law of torts interacted with and responded to a non-state customary law of injury and remediation. These two types of law were associated with two distinctive types of mapping that extended law across the Thai landscape. When European-based laws and legal institutions were first imposed by the emergent Thai state at the turn of the twentieth century, a then unprecedented form of mapping drew boundary lines around political spaces and applied new law codes uniformly throughout the jurisdictions thus enclosed. Such legal maps coexisted with a second type of customary mapping organized around sacred centers from which law radiated outward, diminishing in intensity and effectiveness with distance. The two maps were connected in the sense that injury victims sometimes invoked state law in order to enforce the norms and procedures of customary law.

This article, based on recent interviews with injured persons, lawyers, insurance agents, and others, examines the relationship between state and non-state laws during a period of dramatic social change at the turn of the twenty-first century. It suggests that recent transformations of Thai society have rendered ineffective the customary norms and procedures associated with the law of sacred centers. Since state law no longer interacts with or responds to customary law, ordinary people increasingly view Thai tort law as irrelevant. Litigation rates have fallen and injury victims can no longer envision any effective way to compel injurers to pay compensation.

Publication Title

Law & Society Review

First Page

61

Last Page

94

Comments

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