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We generally try to do sort of current events kind of a mixture of legal news, Immigration news and kind of in a current context but every now and again I like to kind of look back because that is fundamentally what Thai Law or what any legal system does, it looks backwards in the sense that you have to have creative Law in order to have Jurisprudence in a sense, in order to have interpretive law. So the law is always kind of looking backward to one degree or another. Now that being said, in Thailand, jurisprudence goes back a long time. Thailand has never been colonized; it kind of went its own path a little bit during the Cold War, it just goes its own way, it has got its own legal system and it is very interesting. I find it rather fascinating. Now I'm sure there are people that find it utterly boring but this is my channel so I'm going to go ahead and do this video. 

Yeah, the Three Seals Law and I think this is something, what is sometimes called the Three Seals Law, but yeah this was kind of a body of law that came into existence a couple hundred years prior to the Civil and Commercial Code which we will get into that in a moment because it is still valid, it still has ramifications even in the modern time. I just find the stuff fascinating because Thai jurisprudence just goes back quite genuinely into the mists of history, it's really fascinating. In any event, I found this and thought of making this video after getting a recent article from the History of the Court of Justice from coj.go.th. Quoting directly: "The history of the Thai Legal System and the Judiciary can be dated back as far as the Sukhothai Period, (A.D. 1238 - 1350)" I mean we are going back to 1230 A.D. we are talking about this stuff) where  the King was the "Fountain of Justice" who himself adjudicated the disputes between his citizens. During the Ayutthaya period (A.D. 1350 - 1767), the Thai legal system developed and was crystallized in the form which was to last until the close of the 19th century. The Dhammasattham derived from the ancient Hindu jurisprudence was established as the law code of the realm and formed part of the Thai National heritage. It was a fundamental law of individual liberty and private rights dealing with both civil and criminal matters. The concept of Royal Justice administered during the Sukhothai was also carried through the Ayutthaya. The reign of King Taksin the Great between A.D. 1767 - 1782 had little development in the legal field since the country was beset with series of battles. Later at the beginning of the Chakri Dynasty in 1782, the laws derived from the Ayutthaya period were revised and completed in 1805 resulting in the written form of law called "The LAW OF THREE SEALS" and it was called that actually because it had three seals on it. I'm not going to get into this specific history of the Seals. I would urge those who are really interested in this, go look this up because the reason for the three different Seals is rather fascinating in Thai History. Quoting further: "It had been the Authority of the Land until the reign of King Rama V when a reform of the legal and court system was introduced together with an open door policy of trading with foreign nations. In 1882, King Rama V founded the first building of the Courts of Justice." So interesting. The Three Seals Law was presumed to have operated sort of unfettered if you will until essentially the adoption of the Thai Civil and Commercial Code.

Moving over to Wikipedia under the heading Three Seals Law, and I am not saying Wikipedia is the end or be all, I have done my own research on this, I think this kind of succinctly sums up sort of the posture of this overall piece of legislation at this point, let's put it that way. "The Three Seals Law or Three Seals Code is a collection of law text compiled in 1805 on the orders of King Rama 1 of Siam. Most of the texts were laws from the Ayutthaya era which had survived the destruction of Ayutthaya in 1767. The compilation remained the working law of Siam until partially replaced by modern law codes in the early 20th century. The texts are an important source for the history of the Ayutthaya Kingdom and legal history in Asia." I thought this was interesting. I went and looked this up, this appears to be still the case. "Parts of the Three Seals Law are still in force according to a ruling of the Supreme Court of Justice of Thailand in 1978."

So in a sense I guess you can kind of look at it, if we are taking kind of a comparative law perspective. They used to say when we were in Law School looking at jurisprudence from a Common Law perspective “where there is no direct statute, you default into the Common Law” so that means you are looking up Blackstone, you are looking up Hadley versus Baxendale from 400 years in the past, and in the case of the United States going back into England and looking at all of that stuff in order to try and discern sort of where the law falls in the given issue. If you can't find it then you have to deal with it different ways and sometimes Judges get to make new law, it just happens from time to time. In Thailand I find it interesting that if you were to look at sort of the Civil and Commercial Code in much the same way you look at US Statutory Law, in a sense and I am not going to say this is an apples to apples jurisprudence kind of comparative law thing, I am not saying it's precisely the same thing, but in a sense it looks to me like especially based on prior Supreme Court rulings on the matter that where there is sort of an absence of any discussion on a topic in the modern code of law specifically the Civil and Commercial Code or the Criminal Code for that matter, if you are looking to gain some further insight, you may have to fall back into the Three Seals Law in order to maybe ascertain an answer to a given, perhaps nettlesome, legal issue.