ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the development of marriage, divorce, marital property and the law relating to children in selected hybrid or mixed legal systems in Africa and Asia. The rationale for examining these countries within the same chapter is that they have a common denominator – they are all non-Western post-colonial regions. Hence, apart from having a mixture of legal systems and foreign (Western) influences, countries like India, Hong Kong and Singapore may all be labelled as common law jurisdictions, as they rely on case law as their main (received/inherited) source of law, supplemented by statutes. Another common feature of these countries is they all have a tradition of recognising and applying customary or indigenous laws from time to time, alongside more formal written laws.
