Direct legislation has anglicized the law of
contract, and has modified, though not so largely, the law of
marriage, inheritance, and succession.
11. In the author's time the courts of the East India Company still
followed the Muhammadan criminal law, as modified by the Regulations.
The Indian Penal Code of 1869 placed the substantive criminal law on
a thoroughly scientific basis. This code was framed with such
masterly skill that to this day it has needed little material
amendment. The first Criminal Procedure Code, passed in 1861, has
been twice recast. The law of evidence was codified by Sir James
FitzJames Stephen in the Indian Evidence Act of 1870.
12. This proposition, in the editor's opinion, truly states the
theory of land tenures in India, and it was a generally accurate
statement of actual fact in the author's time. Since then the long
continuance of settled government, by fostering the growth of private
rights, has tended to obscure the idea of state ownership. The modern
revenue codes, instead of postulating the ownership of the state,
enact that the claims of the state--that is to say, the land-revenue-
-are the first charge on the land and its produce.
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