Preface

Summary

This book stems from a symposium held at the Faculty of Law of the National University of Singapore on 27–28 September 2012 in honour of Professor M.B. Hooker. Professor Hooker was a pioneer in the field of legal pluralism. In fact, his scholarship laid the foundation of the field. His 1975 book Legal Pluralism: An Introduction to Colonial and Neo-Colonial Laws (1975) was seminal and opened this field of study. The man has been tremendously influential.

In the first chapter of this book, entitled M.B. Hooker and Southeast Asian Law: Path-breaking Passions, Veronica Taylor traces the career of M.B. Hooker and gives us a list of his publications. I will therefore refrain from doing this in this preface. I will however state my admiration for the man and scholar. Professor Hooker has been very influential on me (and so many others), yet I met him for the first time only at the symposium we held in 2012. Although by all accounts M.B. Hooker has been generous in his personal support for young scholars, in my case, due to distance, his influence was not personal but truly merely intellectual, which makes it clear that the man has been a leader in the field.

The chapters of this book are very diverse, reflecting the breadth of legal pluralism and of M.B. Hooker's scholarship, which covered legal pluralism, Islamic law, Malaysian and Indonesian law, adat law, etc. I will not here introduce each of the chapters — the table of contents should suffice to show the breadth of this collection. It is however an homage to M.B. Hooker that colleagues with such diverse interests readily volunteered for a symposium and book in his honour — it shows the breadth of his own scholarship and its influence. All the chapters relate to legal pluralism. All of them relate to Asia (which goes as far as Israel).

I wish to thank my colleagues Veronica Taylor of the Australian National University and Michael Dowdle of the National University of Singapore for assisting me in editing some of the chapters of this book.