Abstract
There are those who say that good laws make good men, and we need only to make the laws good, and the good men will follow. There are those who say that laws are neither good nor bad in themselves, but it is the men who, by working them and living them, turn them good or bad. Those of the first school plead: let us make good laws, borrowing from here or there the best of everything, and the men will grow up to the laws. Those of the second school argue; let us raise good men, educate the young generations, prepare them for the good life, and the good laws will write themselves in course of time.
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References
“To some extent the colouring of left against moderate, pro-Chinese against pro-western, enter into these new rivalries,” editorially commented The Times, London, on March 3, 1962, the day after General Ne Win assumed power in Burma, “as it did into the old, though it would be unwise to interpret Gen. Ne Win’s action in those westernized political terms. The army has acted against the seizure of power by an unprincipled faction.”
E. g. speech in the Chamber of Deputies (Proceedings, April 8, 1960) by Leader of the Opposition, Thakin Tha Khin, in which he stressed the need to uphold the independence of the Judiciary and refrain from putting pressures on the Judges — citing an instance where, he said, such pressures were applied.
D. D. Grover vs. A. C. Koonda, 1955 BLR 54 S. C.
E. g. suggestion made in Parliament by an Opposition member that the Chief Justice of the Union should have been impeached for a judgement he had rendered on the matter of foreign investment, The Guardian, September 26, 1957.
Burma Round Table Conference, Proceedings, Rangoon, 1932, p. 310.
Towards a Socialist State.
There were 22 District and Sessions Judges before the War, and the number was reduced to 17 when British Government returned, and several judicial districts were grouped together. The pre-war strength in the Burma Judicial Service of 81 was increased to 104, and that in the Subordinate Judicial Service was also brought up from 87 to 124. Report on the A dministration of Civil Justice in Burma, for the year 1946, published in Rangoon, 1951.
The Guardian, December 31, 1960, reporting on the annual conference of the Bar Federation.
Indian Constitutional Reform, Joint Committee Records, vol, 2. London, 1934.
Thirkell White, A Civil Servant in Burma, p. 281.
Foucar, I Lived in Burma, p. 210.
The editor of The Guardian, prosecuted for alleged breach of the Official Secrets Act, demanded a jury trial as was his right. The High Court granted his application, and the Supreme Court rejected the Government’s appeal against the grant, saying that the lack of up-to-date rolls of jurors was no good ground for denial of a trial by jury. The Guardian, December 5, 1961.
Report, Rangoon, 1949, p. 23.
The Guardian, December 31, 1960.
Maung Maung, “Lawyers and Legal Education in Burma,” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, London, January, 1962.
A good and thorough study on legal education, modestly called A Brief Note, by Hla Aung may be found in the Journal of the Burma Law Institute, Rangoon, Autumn, 1958.
Some 800 candidates offered themselves for examination in Part A of the B. L. degree in March, 1962, and some 200 for the Part B. The numbers, for the final examination, in the previous years were: 16 in 1946, and in the following years till 1958 — 19, 52, 74, 56, 59, 67, 68, 80, 98, 100, 115 and 158. (“The University of Rangoon,” by Dr. Nyi Nyi, in the New Burma weekly magazine, August 16, 1958).
Several good studies on legal education have been made in recent times, of which the following, among others, are useful: Report of the Denning Committee on Legal Education for Students from Africa, HMSO, 1961; report by Professor Julius Stone of Sydney at a seminar on the constitutions of the new nations, at Canberra, August, 1960; Report on Legal Education in India by Dean Carl Spaeth of the Stanford Law School to the Ford Foundation, March, 1960; a study on Higher Education, Law and the Teaching of Law, in British Africa, by Professor Max Rheinstein of the Chicago Law School, 1960; chapter on legal education by Professors Lasswell and McDougal in Studies in World Public Order, Myres S. McDougal & Associates, Yale University Press, 1960; John B. Howard, International Legal Studies, Chicago Law Review, Summer, 1959.
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© 1963 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Maung, M. (1963). The Legal Profession. In: Law and Custom in Burma and the Burmese Family. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-9257-6_8
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