Fernanda Pirie awarded Leverhulme Trust project funding for research on historic Tibetan law
The Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS) is delighted to announce that Professor Fernanda Pirie has been awarded a Project Grant by the Leverhulme Trust for a three-year project entitled: ‘Tibetan law: the socio-historic exploration of a unique legal system’. The project will begin in October 2025 and will run until September 2028.
Tibetan law remains one of the least well understood of the world’s historic legal systems. Tibetan rulers made remarkably few laws, although they did have a concept of law, khrims, which shifted in meaning over time, from administrative rules, to historic accounts of the Tibetan polity, to bureaucratic decrees, to legal treatises. Aspects of Tibetan law were nominally based on Buddhist principles. However, they formed nothing like the sophisticated legal regimes of other Buddhist regions. Nor do Tibetan texts show much correspondence with the laws of the more legalistic Chinese and Hindu traditions, of which Tibetans would have been well aware. Even when the Dalai Lamas centralized their government in Lhasa in the seventeenth century, they hardly systematised practices of justice and created no detailed practical legal texts.
All of this remains a puzzle and indicates that Tibetan laws and legal practices need to be understood very much on their own terms. It also raises broader questions about forms of government and the role of law within them. Can the Tibetan case shed new light on the relationships between law, government, and religion?
At the heart of this project are texts produced in the seventeenth century, when the Dalai Lamas established their polity in Lhasa. The project will employ two post-doctoral researchers, specialists in classical and legal Tibetan, who will work with Fernanda to translate these texts and analyse their origins, use, and significance. Combining this research with earlier work on Tibetan law, Fernanda will write a book which traces the history of Tibetan law from the seventh to the twentieth centuries. This will offer valuable comparative material for scholars considering law on a global scale, as well as advancing our knowledge of a civilization whose remnants are fast disappearing in the contemporary world.