2001 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
The Influence of the Ottoman Law on the Legal Culture in the Balkans
| Project/Area Number |
10620012
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Fundamental law
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| Research Institution | Hokkai Gakuen University (2000-2001)
Sapporo Gakuin University (1998-1999) |
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Principal Investigator |
ITO Tomoyoshi Hokkai Gakuen University, the Faculty of Law, Professor, 法学部, 教授 (00151522)
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| Project Period (FY) |
1998 – 2000
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| Keywords | Balkan / Legal Culture / Byzantine / Ottoman / Islamic Law / Customary Law / Orthodox / Catholic |
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| Research Abstract |
The chief aim of this research is to make the following questions clear. First, what kind of the situation has made Balkan legal culture different from one in the West? Secondly, what is the difference between the Balkan and the Western legal culture? Thirdly, after the collapse of the socialism in Eastern Europe, the Balkan countries are in the process of the social reform into the market economy. Will their legal culture assimilated into the Western one in this process or will they maintain their own traditional character? Let me point out Byzantine, Ottoman, Modern Western and Socialist law as the main factors which have influenced on the present legal culture in the Balkans. This paper studies the above mentioned problems focusing on the influence of the Ottoman law which had controlled this area as long as five centuries until the modern age in some places.
As a result of the study, it turned to be clear that Islamic law didn't produce direct influence on legal culture among the Christian which got a majority of the population, owing to that the Islamic law were not applied to non Muslim people. Therefore, the considerable range of the legal disputes was resolved not by the Islamic nor Ottoman law but by the traditional Balkan law which had existed before the Ottoman conquest and survived after that. The law consisted of the consisted of the customary and the Byzantine law which was considerably different from the Western modern law basing itself on the Catholic culture. But it must be notices that the influence of the Turkish customs on the way of thinking among the Balkan people were not small at all after the independence from the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan region took the returning way toward Europe. However, the ideological conflict between the Orthodox and the Catholic Church impedes the introduction of the Western modern law into the area, keeping a certain amount of distinction between the Balkan and the Western legal culture.
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