Non-European legal outcomes reflect divergent traditions, not failed modernization.

Evidence

Arguments about the defensive character of legal reforms are not new. The numerous reforms initiated by the Ottomans since the eighteenth century have long been described in precisely that way. My interest, however, is not in speculating about an old motive (resistance) but about new institutional and discursive spaces (themselves not immutably fixed) that make different kinds of knowledge, action, and desire possible. That the results of these changes were not exactly European has also long been recognized, but there are two ways of looking at this outcome: either (as the majority of historians have claimed) as evidence of “a failure to modernize properly,” or (and this is just beginning to be proposed) as expressions of different experiences rooted in part in traditions other than those to which the European-inspired reforms belonged, and in part in contradictory European representations of European modernity. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1038

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Litigation levels reflect societal values and governmental access policies, not inevitable development — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 1148