Religion, law and Bhagat Singh

When the East India Company first came to India in 1601, it claimed — through the principle of extraterritoriality — to be governed by its own laws, rejecting lex loci or the local laws of the Mughal Empire and its feudatories. Accordingly, the earliest charters empowered the East India Company to draw up reasonable laws in consonance with the principles of English common law. The charter of 1726 applied the laws of England, in entirety, directly to the East India Company’s holdings in India, namely the towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, and all their residents. English law was applied in these towns not just to the English settlers and traders but all communities, castes and people residing within the boundaries of these towns, without any distinction.

Law unto themselves

Book Recommendation: All England Law Reports Consolidated Tables and Index
By Yasser Latif Hamdani

All England Law Reports — the most reliable record of English case law — date back to 1558. Recorded case law dates back another 400 years prior to that. In 1558, the English began to see the benefit of compiling and publishing case law for easy reference.

Institutions like Lincoln’s Inn had already been serving the legal community since the 13th century when a papal decree forbade clergy from teaching common law, thereby separating temporal law from the church. Thus, by the time All England Law Reports were being organised, the modern English legal system was already into its third or fourth century. Consider, then, that in 1558, Mughal emperor Akbar the Great ruled as a despot with a remarkable concentration of power and Suleiman the Magnificent ruled the Ottoman Empire as God’s shadow on earth. These two great monarchs were literally the law, while in England, the greatest queen to rule the western world, ruled limited by the Magna Carta — arguably the world’s first modern constitution.