The Golden Yoke of Buddhist Tibet, one of the last mediaeval legal systems, has been still functioning in the 1940s and 1950s. Rebecca French conducted extensive ethnographic research on the last years of its existence (1940-1959).
The fieldwork lasted 10 years, and was localised both in Tibet and beyond. It focuses primarily on the relation between law and Buddhism.
This wonderful and exhaustive book is one of the most significant contributions to the anthropology of law. The advisor of Rebecca French was Leopold Pospíšil (Professor of Yale University) who came from Czechoslovakia to USA and played the formative role in the establishment of the anthropology of law in USA.