Page 343 - UAE Truncal States

Clwptnr Eight

issues which had initially been regulated by laws in use in other
areas of British jurisdiction (for example the Indian Contract Law) ion
were covered by a new regulation which was eventually formulated
specifically for the Trucial Slates.
The effects
Thus the Trucial Stales were exposed for two decades to British
legislation, jurisdiction and legal thinking in three ways. Firstly,
legislation created for British colonies elsewhere was applied
unchanged; secondly, British law was modified to suit the conditions
of the entire Gulf area or just the Trucial States; thirdly, English legal
thinking exerted in some instances a strong influence when the local
authorities of the day formulated their own regulations and laws. But
compared to most countries which had been former British colonies,
the influence of British legal thinking was nevertheless only skin-
deep. The duration of the influence was too short to create a tradition
which might have made recourse to British legal principles the most
obvious and automatic reaction even after the ties with the British
legal system were severed. As will be seen later,110 when the process
of drafting new laws, at a local as well as a federal level, was
accelerated after 1971, the new laws were most frequently modelled
on Egyptian, Sudanese and Jordanian examples, where an assimi­
lation of mostly French and British law with the principles of
sharTah had already been made. However, for practical purposes,
because there was in some cases a long delay in either local or federal
legislation, many of the earlier regulations remained in force for
several years. Matters concerning commerce and contracts in par­
ticular are even now often regulated according to the Indian Code or
the code formulated especially for the Trucial States, because both
parties in a civil contract agree to follow these rather than any other
codes equally foreign in a Stale which has not yet formulated all the
relevant commercial regulations of its own.
From the outset of formal British jurisdiction in the Trucial States
there was provision for co-operation with the existing local bodies of
jurisdiction, and in practice the British officials often helped to
strengthen local jurisdiction by suggesting the establishment of local
courts for various specialised matters in all the States, and the
recruitment of legal advisers from Arab or Muslim countries.111
Provisions were made to allow for cases which concerned people not
subject to the Orders in Council to be tried either in a joint court or to

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