This special issue of the Law & Society Review grows out of a unique intellectual encounter: an attempt by the Association to reach beyond its usual geographical horizons and to listen to and engage in conversation with a group of scholars from a region of the world—Southeast Asia—that has received little attention within the law and society community. This conversation is significant for the Association in several ways. First, as our scholarly community becomes more aware of the globalization of our field and the interconnections between our interests and developments in other regions of the world, it behooves us to make new efforts to broaden our understanding of sociolegal issues that are important to the scholars and peoples of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and other world regions. Second, if the Association is to realize its aspirations to internationalize its membership, we should at the same time attempt to understand the scholarly interests and commitments of new colleagues with whom we seek to share our community. We must therefore find ways to listen to the voices of scholars in regions of the world whose work may not yet be familiar to the Review's general readership. Third, the infusion of new perspectives, new research issues, and new voices can enrich the dialogue among sociolegal scholars in many ways. Familiar topics—legal pluralism, the family, crime, the environment, civil rights—can be seen in a new light; and topics that now receive somewhat less attention among North American and European sociolegal scholars—indigenous peoples, law and religion, land rights—emerge as fundamentally important and deserving of renewed research interest.

The conference began with a discussion of law and religion and four days later ended with a discussion of concepts of rights in Southeast Asia. The merging of the two topics in this symposium issue reflects a recognition that both concern questions of social order, political legitimacy, sovereignty, personhood, and belief. It reflects as well a recognition that the topics have a single history. As Frank Reynolds observes (with some understatement) in the essay that begins this part, religion as a cultural system and law as a cultural system “overlap and interact in many very different and complicated ways.”

This article explores the ways in which law and religion overlap and interact in Thailand. The imaginative-symbolic dimensions of Thai law and religion share many common elements, which have been apparent in the discourse of national politics throughout the 20th century and in the discourse associated with conflict, dissent, and reform in contemporary Thailand. With the emergence of a constitutional monarchy in the 1930s, traditional Buddhist concepts of cosmic law and religion were fused with new concepts of political administration and legal authority. A new “civic religion” emerged, resting on the threefold formula of nation, religion, and kingship. This evolving civic religious tradition has provided a framework for both the imaginative-symbolic and the more practical, action-oriented discourses that characterize modern Thai legal culture.

Thailand in the late 19th and early 20th centuries transformed its legal and administrative structure from one based on the principles of sacred kingship to one based on the symbols of a constitutional monarchy in a Western-style nation-state. This transformation had important implications for the status of the Muslim minority population residing primarily in the four southernmost provinces of Thailand. Traditionally, one of the most important responsibilities of the Thai king was to uphold and protect Thai Buddhism and to oversee and purify the Buddhist clergy. In the new nation-state, these governmental responsibilities were generalized to some extent to include other religions of Thai citizens, such as Islam. This process of generalization, however, was associated with certain conceptual and political problems, whose analysis in this article sheds light not only on the status of the Muslim minority in contemporary Thailand but also on modern concepts of religion, law, and kingship in the Thai polity.

Members of the Muslim minority in the Philippines have a distinctive legal culture whose rules and customs are grounded in Islam. To address this situation of legal pluralism, the government in 1977 enacted a Code of Muslim Personal Laws, which stands alongside the Philippines Family Code and Civil Code and officially recognizes the principle of plural legal regimes for at least one minority cultural and religious group within the general population. This article, written by a participant in the legislative process, explores the complexities of conceptualizing and drafting the Code. These complexities include the use of ethnographic descriptions of customary law within the Muslim community, the selection of rules from among the different schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and the harmonization of conflicts between the laws now applicable to Muslims and non-Muslims in the Philippines.

Indonesian political leaders in the mid-20th century attempted to create a new state founded both on the rule of law and on their understandings of traditional Indonesian communal life. They sought simultaneously to “advance” toward modernization and industrialization and to preserve older, village-level norms and values which they projected onto the national legal and political screen. This article examines the inconsistencies inherent in these twin aspirations and the continuing tensions, during a period of rapid growth and economic development, between rights-based conceptions and those based on an ideology of harmony and communal village life.

The author argues that in Thai society, woman- and family-related issues fall outside the direct domain of law. The family as a subsistence unit has been challenged by opportunities for wage labor in cities and towns. These opportunities, which have dispersed the family unit and eroded the authority of parents, have been particularly advantageous for women, who are seen as good workers, obedient and undemanding. Yet the power of the family as a psychological unit in Thailand has not altered. Likewise, although women have made gains in the market and the workplace, the possibility of achieving greater parity with men is hindered by the continued psychological force of the traditional “beauty culture,” their historical place as appendages to men, the cultural devaluation of manual work, and the religious definition of women as polluting. While the law is not irrelevant to these issues, they are neither determined by law nor are they likely to be altered by legal change.

The author examines the persistence of discriminatory inheritance practices that exclude daughters from inheriting land, houses, and other unmovable property from their parents among urban Toba Batak people in Indonesia. These practices persist in spite of national legal policy mandating equal rights for men and women. Drawing on Sally Falk Moore's concept of the semi-autonomous social field, the essay argues that traditional forms of inheritance are maintained through the marga-association, which brings together people who share the same name and affirms principles of patrilineal descent as the defining characteristics of Batak identity in contemporary urban settings. Both men and women voluntarily affirm these principles, arguing that because a woman becomes part of her husband's lineage at the time of marriage, she is not entitled to her father's estate. The marga-association thus acts as an insulating mechanism between state law and traditional (adat) law, protecting the latter from the legal transformations imposed by the state.

The author traces the changing social and legal status of the Filipina by examining the shifting Filipino colonial and legal heritage from the immigration of Muslim Malays in the 14th century to the present. She argues that women enjoyed high social standing in what is now the Philippine Republic until colonization by Spain in the 17th century, when Spanish customs, religion, and law imposed many restraints on women. Only with the establishment of the Philippine Republic in 1946 were efforts begun to reverse these restrictive policies. The author focuses particularly on the 1986 Constitution and the changes in the Family Code that have enhanced the legal equality of women within the family. She also calls for continued political work to assure the implementation of existing law and further legal changes that will benefit women.

The author discusses the complex ways in which a multiplicity of conflicting laws relevant to marriage and divorce have affected Malaysian women, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Further, it examines efforts to standardize statute and practice in these areas from the 1970s to the present. It focuses in particular on multiple marriage statutes in effect until 1970 for Chinese and Hindu Malays and on the Law Reform Act 1976 that attempted to regulate customary marriage practices for non-Muslims. It also examines the codification of Islamic family law in the 1980s as a way of clarifying the legal rights of Muslim women, focusing on the Kelantan Island Family Law Enactment 1983. It also describes political action by women in Malaysia to raise public awareness about domestic violence, to amend the Penal Code on matters of violence against women, and to establish a training program for police in rape investigation.