It was not initially published, indicating its function as a reliable guide for officials and judges rather than a statement of the rights of Siamese subjects ( Hooker, 1986 Vickery, 1996). A response to the perceived decline in legal veracity resulting from the destruction of Siam's legal records in the sack of Ayutthaya by the Burmese in 1767, it attempted to restate the entire law of Siam in terms of the Buddhist Dhammasat along with royal decrees of general application. The Law of the Three Seals is of particular interest in terms of codification. Preeminent examples are the Undang–Undang Melaka and the Undang–Undang Laut Melaka (Laws of Malacca, fifteenth century) ( Liaw, 1976) Siam's 1805 Law of the Three Seals ( Harding, 2008) and the codes of the Le dynasty in Vietnam (fifteenth to eighteenth centuries). Attempts at codification were designed to consolidate the entire law or at least large portions of it. Traditional law in Southeast Asia did not distinguish fields of law in same way that European law consistently did: notably they did not distinguish criminal, public, family, and property law. These should be distinguished from codes in the European sense of attempts to reform as well as to consolidate the law in a given area. There are many examples in Southeast Asia of attempts to codify the law. It would, however, be erroneous to think that codes and statutes played no part in precolonial law. The Malaysian state of Sarawak, for example, applies an almost complete system of formal legal pluralism by applying adat in the Native Courts, shari'a in the Syariah Courts, and common law in the civil courts, which also apply the customary law of nonnative groups, such as the Chinese ( Hooker, 1980). Nowadays adat still prevails as an aspect of law applicable in the religious courts of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and as the main form of law applicable to the ‘native’ or indigenous peoples of Borneo. A fundamental distinction within these varieties was that between adat temenggong and adat perpatih the latter, applicable mainly in the Minangkabau areas of West Sumatra (Indonesia) and Negri Sembilan (Malaya) excited much interest with its matrilineal system of succession to property and its female-centered laws. He founded the adatrecht school at Leiden University, in which Dutch and Indonesian scholars mapped out 19 regional varieties of adat in the Dutch East Indies ( Holleman, 1981 Burns, 2004). The famous Dutch legal scholar Cornelis Van Vollenhoven argued strongly and successfully in favor of allowing the Indonesians to be governed by their own adat instead of Dutch law ( Fasseur, 1992). Its typical mode of enforcement was via criminal or social sanctions ( Hooker, 1970). It dealt not just with social and moral issues (family and criminal law in modern parlance) but also with property, agriculture, the environment, and even constitutional issues. Adat varied somewhat from place to place, but conforms to conventional notions of customary law: it was handed down as an oral tradition often took the form of easily recalled proverbs, homilies, or brief lines of poetry, often containing analogies to the natural world and applied generally at the village level. It mingled with Islamic law in what Hooker calls the Malay legal world of Indonesia and Malaysia, and has survived both colonial rule and postcolonial nationalist modernization.
Malay customary law or adat is by far the most typical, distinctive, and widespread form of customary law in Southeast Asia. Muslim communities are, however, spread across all of Southeast Asia, and Islamic legal traditions are formally recognized not just in Malaysia and Indonesia, but also in Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand ( Hooker, 1986).
Islam began to be influential from the early fifteenth century, especially in the Malay world of peninsular Malaya, Indonesia, and Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Hinduism had influence across much of archipelagic Southeast Asia, replacing Buddhism to some extent in Indonesia, and even to this day in Bali. Buddhist legal traditions prevailed in continental Southeast Asia ( Huxley, 1996), and were used along with royal decrees and village customary dispute settlement systems. Harding, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015 Precolonial Lawīefore the intervention of colonial powers from the fall of Malacca to the Portuguese in 1514, law in Southeast Asia was based either on customs, on religion, or on codes, and often on all three.
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