Western notions about law usually say that law and government are connected; no government equals no law. But an old legal tradition from Burma called dhammasattha shows a different way. It suggests that a complete legal system can exist without a single, powerful ruler.
I. Introduction: The Problem of Law Without Sovereignty
When students of jurisprudence first cut their teeth on John Austin’s command theory, they often walked away with a simple lesson: no sovereign, no law. So the story goes, law is the command of a determinate sovereign, backed by the threat of sanction. This picture, reinforced in different ways by Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian reformism and later by H.L.A. Hart’s refinements make sovereignty look like oxygen: without it, legal order cannot breathe. Even Ronald Dworkin, who tried to move past rules into the realm of principles, still framed his jurisprudence within the machinery of the state. It is a picture of law tightly yoked to sovereign power, and for generations it has been taught as a near-universal truth.
But what if sovereignty is not a necessary condition of law? What if law can find its lifeblood in sources other than the fiat of rulers or the recognition of officials? This is the paradox raised by the dhammasattha tradition of early modern Burma. Dhammasattha texts, most famously the Manusāra-dhammasattha of 1651–52, present a body of jurisprudence that looks startlingly sophisticated, yet it derives its authority not from sovereign command but from cosmology, karma, and moral obligation. These texts claimed that law was not made at all, but discovered, as if inscribed on the very walls of the universe. The lawgiver, Manu, was not a king but a sage; the “sovereign” was the moral order of the cosmos itself.
This raises a profound challenge to the standard Western narrative. If Burmese jurists could construct and transmit an entire system of law without tethering it to the authority of a monarch or parliament, then perhaps the Western fixation on sovereignty is not universal truth but provincial habit. What the dhammasattha offers, then, is a radical counterpoint: a jurisprudence where authority is plural, obligation is moral, and justice is tied to the cycle of karma rather than the penal code.
The aim of this essay is to draw that comparison. First, I will outline how sovereignty functions in the jurisprudential canon of Austin, Bentham, Hart, and Dworkin. Then, I will set against this the Burmese dhammasattha corpus, examining its cosmological foundations, its separation of lay and monastic jurisdictions, and its plural authority structures. Finally, I will argue that dhammasattha demonstrates that law without sovereignty is not only possible but durable, forcing us to reconsider the deepest assumptions of jurisprudence.
II. Western Sovereignty-Based Jurisprudence
Western jurisprudence, at least in its canonical form, rarely strays far from the throne room. Law and sovereignty are pictured as Siamese twins: cut them apart, and the body politic collapses. John Austin’s Province of Jurisprudence Determined is the bluntest expression of this. For him, law is simply “the command of the sovereign” backed by the threat of sanctions. A rule without the bite of punishment was not law but a mere “positive morality.” In Austin’s stark vision, if a society lacks a determined sovereign who habitually commands and is habitually obeyed, then it lacks law altogether.
Jeremy Bentham gave this framework a utilitarian polish. The sovereign, for Bentham, should legislate in order to maximise the greatest happiness of the greatest number. He was less interested in the metaphysics of sovereignty than in its function; the sovereign should be a rational legislator, using law to excise social ills and promote welfare. But the basic structure remained the same: law’s authority still rested on the sovereign’s command, even if the sovereign was urged to be benevolent rather than arbitrary.
H.L.A. Hart, writing in the mid-twentieth century, found Austin’s picture too crude. Not all laws come with explicit sanctions, and not all authority flows in one direction. Hart introduced the idea of a “rule of recognition,” a social practice among officials that marks which norms count as valid law. Yet even this refinement presupposes a structured community of officials operating under a centralised legal system. Sovereignty here is diffused and procedural, but it is still sovereignty: law is valid only because officials recognise it within an institutional framework.
Ronald Dworkin went further still. He insisted that law is not only a matter of rules but also of principles, moral standards that judges use to interpret hard cases. In Dworkin’s world, judges are like novelists writing a chain of stories, each decision constrained by what came before but guided also by the best interpretation of legal morality. Yet for all his emphasis on morality, Dworkin still assumed the background of a sovereign state whose courts and officials provide the institutional stage.
So from Austin’s sovereign with a whip, to Bentham’s calculating legislator, to Hart’s community of rule-following officials, to Dworkin’s interpretive judges, most of the Western canon shares a common assumption: law is tethered to the state, and sovereignty is its anchor. Without it, so the story goes, there can be no real jurisprudence, only custom, morality, or religion.
III. Burmese Legal Cosmology
If Austin pictured law as the bark of a sovereign’s order, Burmese dhammasattha jurists imagined it as something closer to bedrock that is not barked into existence but inscribed on the universe itself. The tradition traces its authority to a mythic act: the sage Manu, possessing vast spiritual merit, transcribed law from the “boundary wall of the universe”. This was not a sovereign legislature but a sage discovering, not invention but revelation. In this worldview, law is eternal, impartial, and supra-human, as much a fact of the cosmos as gravity or karma.
Christian Lammerts’ meticulous history shows that this cosmological framing was not a decorative preface but the very foundation of Burmese legal reasoning. Dhammasattha texts repeatedly emphasise that law is timeless and unchanging, accessible only to those with the spiritual merit to perceive it. The act of legal interpretation, then, was less like enforcing the sovereign’s command and more like aligning human affairs with cosmic order. A dispute over inheritance or land was not merely a quarrel between parties; it was an occasion to restore balance with the eternal moral law that governed all beings.
This cosmological account bears superficial resemblance to Western natural law traditions. Cicero spoke of lex naturalis as a universal reason binding gods and men alike, while Aquinas insisted that human law must be derived from eternal law to be just. Yet the dhammasattha conception is not rooted in divine reason or Christian theology but in Buddhist cosmology and the workings of karma. Where natural law theorists anchored obligation in rational discernment of the good, Burmese jurists saw obligation in the inescapable law of cause and effect. To act unjustly was not only to violate social norms but to also incur karmic consequences that could stretch across lifetimes.
The difference is crucial. Western natural law often functioned as a moral limit on sovereign power — the king must rule in accordance with reason or God’s law. But in dhammasattha texts, sovereignty barely enters the picture at all. The legitimacy of law does not depend on a ruler’s command or consent but on its fidelity to cosmic truth. Sovereignty, in other words, is not the source of law but at most a participant in its application.
This vision destabilises the positivist assumption that law must flow from an identifiable authority. In dhammasattha jurisprudence, law is valid not because officials recognise it or because a ruler wills it, but because it is woven into the fabric of the universe.
IV. Manusāra-dhammasattha
If the cosmic wall of the universe supplied dhammasattha with its authority, the Manusāra-dhammasattha (1651–52) shows how that authority was worked out in practice. Written collaboratively by Taungbhila Sayadaw, a learned monk and vinaya specialist, and Kaingza Manurāja, a lay judge and tax official, the text is one of the clearest examples of law as a shared project between religious and secular expertise. In its bilingual Pali-Burmese form, it bridged the language of Buddhist scholarship and the idiom of everyday administration.
This dual authorship was not a quirk of history but a signal of dhammasattha’s pluralism. The monk brought to the table the authority of the vinaya, which is the disciplinary code of the monastic order, while the judge contributed practical experience of disputes among lay communities. The resulting text did not collapse the two domains into one, but carefully demarcated them: monastic life was governed by vinaya, while the laity followed dhammasattha. The very separation reaffirmed that law was not the monopoly of a single sovereign but a patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions.
Equally striking is the way obligation was conceived. In Western jurisprudence, law obliges because sanctions loom: fail to pay taxes and expect a fine; break the king’s peace and risk prison. In dhammasattha jurisprudence, the sting lay less in punishment than in karma. Wrongdoing carried consequences that no earthly sovereign could override. To cheat in a dispute was to bind oneself to karmic retribution, perhaps not today or tomorrow, but inevitably.
From a comparative standpoint, the Manusāra tradition undermines the idea that Hart’s “rule of recognition” is a universal account of validity. In Burma, the recognition of law did not come solely from officials agreeing upon a rule, but from its consonance with cosmology and its acceptance across communities. Law was recognised not just in the king’s court but in the monastery, the village, and the karmic order of the cosmos. Authority, in other words, was distributed rather than centralised.
The Manusāra-dhammasattha also reveals that Burmese legal thought was not static but inventive. By producing a bilingual text co-authored across domains, its writers were reimagining dhammasattha as a distinctly Burmese product, neither mere Buddhist scripture nor royal decree. It was, as Lammerts notes, a “genre of legal reasoning” that carried its own jurisprudential weight.
So if Austin imagined law as a sovereign’s command barked through statute, the Manusāra suggests a very different metaphor: law as a dialogue, a collaborative act of weaving together cosmic principles, monastic discipline, and lay practice into a fabric strong enough to hold society.
V. Legal Pluralism in Practice
The dhammasattha tradition never claimed to stand alone. Far from being the sole arbiter of justice, it functioned alongside, and sometimes in tension with, other normative orders. Monastic life was governed by the vinaya, a separate and highly detailed system of rules for Buddhist monks. Kings issued edicts and royal orders that addressed matters ranging from taxation to military service. Customary practices varied from region to region, shaping how disputes were resolved in villages and families. Rather than seeing these domains as rivals, Burmese jurists treated them as complementary spheres, each with its own jurisdiction and authority.
This pluralism is striking when contrasted with Western legal thought, which often assumes that a legal system must be unified under a single sovereign authority. English criminal law, for instance, presents itself as the exclusive voice of the Crown; rival claims to legal authority are treated as either subordinate or illegitimate. Austin’s insistence that law requires a determined sovereign reflects this obsession with unity. By that measure, Burma ought to have looked lawless, yet what we see instead is a vibrant patchwork of overlapping legalities coexisting without collapsing into chaos.
The effect is to destabilise the assumption that unity is the hallmark of legality. As Bronislaw Malinowski observed in his classic anthropological study Crime and Custom in Savage Society, order can be maintained even in the absence of centralised coercion; obligation can arise from reciprocal expectations and cultural norms rather than from a sovereign’s command. The dhammasattha tradition demonstrates the same principle, but with an added cosmological dimension. It was not only custom or reciprocity that bound individuals but also karmic consequences and the weight of textual authority.
In practice, this meant that litigants could navigate multiple sources of law. A dispute over monastic property might be heard in reference to vinaya rules; a village inheritance quarrel might invoke dhammasattha principles; a case of treason would fall under royal edict. Far from being anarchic, this multiplicity of forums allowed Burmese jurisprudence to adapt flexibly to different contexts. Law here was not a monolith but a constellation.
This has powerful implications for jurisprudence. If Burmese legal order flourished without collapsing into the chaos that Austin feared, then perhaps sovereignty is not the glue that holds law together after all. Perhaps pluralism, far from being a mark of weakness or underdevelopment, is the natural state of legal systems. From this perspective, Western legal theory’s insistence on sovereign unity looks less like a universal truth and more like a historical peculiarity.
VI. Conclusion; Rethinking Jurisprudence Without Sovereignty
The dhammasattha tradition is a challenge and perhaps even a provocation to the Western canon of jurisprudence. Austin taught us to look for the sovereign who commands; Hart told us to watch for officials recognizing rules; Dworkin urged us to search for principles within the practice of state law. Yet in early modern Burma none of these touchstones quite fit. Here was a legal tradition that traced its origins to the wall of the universe, that grounded obligation in karma as much as in custom, and that operated through plural authorities rather than a single sovereign centre.
This is not to suggest that Burma had no rulers or courts; kings did issue edicts, and lay judges did adjudicate disputes. But the striking point is that the dhammasattha corpus never presented law as the command of those rulers. Sovereignty was not the fountainhead but just one stream among many. Authority could be monastic, textual, communal, or cosmological and obligation could flow from fear of karmic retribution as much as from fear of worldly punishment.
What does this mean for jurisprudence? First, it undercuts the assumption that sovereignty is a universal feature of law. Sovereignty may loom large in Western theory, but in comparative perspective it looks less like a necessity and more like a local habit. Second, it suggests that pluralism is not a defect to be overcome but a mode of legal order in its own right. Burmese jurisprudence was not chaotic for lacking a unitary sovereign; rather, it thrived on its patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions. Finally, it expands our sense of what counts as jurisprudence. To ignore dhammasattha because it does not fit the Austinian mould is to miss an entire genre of sophisticated legal reasoning.
So perhaps the question posed at the outset, can there be jurisprudence without sovereignty? must be answered with a firm yes. The dhammasattha tradition proves that law can live and breathe without a single sovereign voice to animate it. If anything, it shows that law may be at its richest when it draws its authority from multiple sources: cosmic order, moral obligation, communal recognition, and even royal power. In this light, sovereignty begins to look less like law’s lifeblood and more like just one organ among many.
The lesson, then, is not that Western jurisprudence is wrong, but that it is incomplete. To understand law in its global diversity, we must look beyond the throne room and listen too to the walls of the universe.
Bibliography:
Austin, J. (1832) The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. London: John Murray.
Lammerts, D.C. (2018) Buddhist Law in Burma: A History of Dhammasattha Texts and Jurisprudence, 1250–1850. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
British Library (2021) Transcribed from the Boundary Wall of the Universe: Early Dhammasattha
Manuscripts in the Burmese Collection of the British Library. Asian and African Studies Blog. Available at:
https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2021/11/transcribed-from-the-boundary-wall-of-the-universe-e arly-dhammasattha-manuscripts-in-the-burmese-col.html
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/bentham1780.pdf https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Province_of_Jurisprudence_Determined.html?id=Lm_ _im02ewsC
Hart, H.L.A. (1961) The Concept of Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dworkin, R. (1977) Taking Rights Seriously. London: Duckworth.
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