“The King Does Not Destroy the Customs of the Land”: Questions about legal pluralism in early modern Tibet

In seventeenth-century Tibet, law codes were issued as a new unified state under the rule of the Dalai Lamas was being created. These laws needed to support the governance of farming and pastoralist communities, monasteries and aristocratic estates, and the management of regional authorities. The codes appear to be neither revolutionary nor reformist in nature. From a contemporary perspective, they are a curious blend: they contain some practices regularly associated with the medieval world, while others may even strike us as liberal. They approve of many customary practices, especially relating to dispute resolution, through reliance on mediators, negotiated settlements, and compensation payments.

This presentation draws from our ongoing translation and analysis of legal texts, pronouncements, administrative instructions, and other writings from seventeenth-century Tibet. These sources hint that certain matters should be “submitted to the law”; that is, dealt with by authorities presiding at a “seat of justice”. Others could be handled without such submissions, by the parties concerned. This could suggest distinct areas of jurisdiction, but as yet, no indication has been found of a formal separation, such as that between criminal and civil law. Furthermore, the two areas interact and occasionally seem to merge. The elaborate provisions relating to “blood money” in particular highlight the uncertain boundary between imposed judgement and negotiated settlement.

Research into legal pluralism has challenged the idea that law must form a single, uniform system controlled by a state (Tamanaha 2021). Recent work examines how authorities manage relations among different normative orders (Otis, Leclair and Thériault 2023). But legal pluralism’s expanded notion of what counts as law perhaps risks obscuring some important historical distinctions. The Tibetan materials prompt us to consider a fundamental question: what constituted law in seventeenth-century Tibet?