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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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