Horizontal and Vertical Influences in Colonial Legal Transplantation: Water Bylaws in British Palestine

Abstract

Local bylaws were the primary tool for local governments in British-ruled Palestine to exercise their authority, and water was the paradigmatic subject for local legislation. Looking at the diffusion of legal norms in local bylaws in the 1930s and '40s, the article examines the dynamics of law-making in a context characterized by both imperial rule and inter-communal conflict. The article asks two major questions: To what extent did the bylaws adopt legal norms and forms across communal boundaries? And was the legislation passed by local governments as the product of local preferences and initiative, or did it rather reflect the desires of the British rulers?

Understanding the processes of legal transplantation at the local level can help shed light on a number of issues. For the history of Mandate Palestine, it can refine our understanding of the degree to which the Arab and Jewish communities, engaged in sustained conflict, nonetheless interacted in the fields of urban infrastructure and local law-making. For imperial environmental history, it provides an opportunity to test theories about water policy as an expression of top-down power. For the legal history of empire, it highlights a level of law-making, located somewhere between imperial imposition and indigenous resistance, that has largely been neglected. And for understanding of legal transplantation or diffusion, it offers a fine-grained case study in the way in which legal norms might move – and transform – across jurisdictional, communal, and cultural lines.

Keywords: Palestine, Mandate, Jewish, Arab, legal transplantation, water, sewage