Suprawee (Earn) Asanasak is a PhD candidate at Melbourne Law School. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the issues of legal transplant in a post-Western legal tradition, especially in Thailand and South East Asia.
Drawing from various disciplines, the trajectory of her research aims to explore the intimate and foreign relationships between law and life primarily from the Thai and South East Asian experiences. Her research interests cover the areas of critical jurisprudence, comparative law, legal history, and law and society.
Prior to commencing her doctoral studies, Suprawee was a lecturer at the Faculty of Law, Thammasat University in Bangkok, where she taught legal philosophy and civil law for over three years. She holds an LLB in Politics, Philosophy, and Law from King’s College London, and an LLM from Duke University.
Thesis Title
The Cartographies of Post-Western Legal Systems: A Post-Colonial and Transnational Investigation on Thailand’s Modern Legal System
Thesis Summary
The thesis aims to seriously investigate the post-Western legal tradition with specific attention to the Thai legal system. The term ‘post-Western’ was first coined as an attempt to capture a commonality among diverse legal systems in South East Asia. Highlighting the region’s unique cultural pluralism and its experience of colonialism, the post-Western legal system is defined as a legal system that passes through Western legal discourses, consuming, adapting, and imitating Western doctrines to serve local demands, and then emerges as Western with new twists. In short, a post-Western legal tradition is a tradition that functions through a continuing process of legal transplant.
Using the continuous process of legal transplant as the primary navigating tool, the thesis aims to explore the form of law and life that emerge as a result of the process. Ultimately, the thesis aims to understand how Thai people come to live with modern law, an object that is foreign yet strangely familiar to them.
Supervisors
- Jurisprudence
- Asian Law
- Legal Theory
- Comparative Law