A Short Research Guide to Myanmar's Legal System

Researchers of Myanmar’s legal system have faced similar challenges to researchers of the country from other disciplines over the past few decades. Access to resources, particularly for foreign researchers, was severely limited prior to 2011. Due to heavy censorship and the overall decline in legal education and professionalism in Myanmar from the 1960s onwards, much of the research produced locally is of a low standard. Most of it follows rather narrow, well-trodden paths, and rarely raises critical questions or engages with the larger empirical problems facing legal institutions and legal professionals in Myanmar. Despite the challenging conditions, many legal sources do, however, exist, both in print and online. This chapter identifies some of those materials and is oriented towards primary sources, although it also includes some limited discussion of secondary sources by Burmese authors. The chapter is focused on laws and institutions introduced from the British colonial period onwards. It divides the materials thematically, and discusses what is available to researchers in English and Burmese languages.