The Nizamiye Court System: An Overview

Abstract

Laws and legal systems have been circulating around the globe since antiquity. Reception of foreign law and legal structures is a typical feature of legal change across regions and periods. The legal orders born out of the often lengthy processes of legal borrowing are amalgams of various legal sources.1 The reception of Roman law in Western Continental Europe was a saga that lasted some seven hundred years, beginning in the eleventh century and resulting in the marginalization of European customary law in favor of Roman law. Likewise, premodern Ottoman sultanic law (kanun) contained a good deal of pre-Ottoman legal concepts and even technical terminology that preserved non-Turkish terms.2 Legal borrowing during the long nineteenth century was different, however. It bore the marks of all those elements of the passage to modernity that are recognized almost instinctively, first and foremost the rapidity of change. Indeed, the pace of legal change was unprecedented in many parts of the globe. Movement of legal structures, laws, and cultures was embedded in globalization, colonialism, and changing class relations on the local and the global levels. During the century, French Napoleonic law was received in Latin America, East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Labeling this remarkable success of French law as westernization would be too simple and misleading, because it tends to overlook the fact that all processes of legal borrowing result in hybrid legal regimes, which altogether manifest an extraordinary variety of legal systems.KeywordsPublic ProsecutorCivil SectionJudicial ReformJudicial OfficialProvincial GovernorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.