At the Origins of Indian Legal Culture: Studies by Judge W. Jones

Based on the portrait method of historical research, the professional (primarily scientific) activities of Sir William Jones, an outstanding British legal scholar and philologist, who served as a judge of the Calcutta Supreme Court during the existence of the colonial judicial system in India, are highlighted. The introduction substantiates the novelty of the subject under consideration, due to the fact that the work of W. Jones has not attracted the attention of representatives of Russian legal science at the moment. This circumstance is partly due to the lack of interest in the study of Indo-Iranian (Avestan and Vedic) legal cultures and their influence on the formation of the legal consciousness of the ancient Slavs. Meanwhile, in the fields of scientific knowledge related to jurisprudence (and above all in the framework of such a field of research, which is designated as linguistic paleontology), there is more and more evidence of the presence of such an influence. The article examines the main stages of the scientific and professional biography of W. Jones as a researcher of the legal culture of ancient India, the first translator of Manu Laws into English, the founder of the Asian Society in Calcutta, a scientist whose work formed the basis for the formation of Indology as a branch of Oriental studies, comparative mythology as a direction and methodology of scientific research on the culture of the Ancient World and linguistic comparative studies as a comparative historical study of the degree of kinship between the languages of different peoples, dating back to a common ancestral language. The article analyzes the contribution of W. Jones to the study of ancient Indian legal culture and to the creation of a new legal and judicial system in India based on combining the legal content of local customs and laws of the British Empire with their strict formal certainty. In conclusion, the need for a deeper study of the legal culture of Ancient India is noted and the relevance of research in this field for domestic legal science is substantiated, due to the influence of Indo-Iranian culture on the formation of the legal consciousness of the ancient Slavs.