This essay considers the legal strategies of comparative communities in South Asian, Middle Eastern, and US history. What does it mean for a particular group to “hijack” a body of law, taking everyone on board to an unwanted destination? The piece compares the legal strategies of the Parsi community in colonial and postcolonial India to those of the German Jewish yekke population in mandate Palestine and early independent Israel, the women’s movement in India in recent decades, and Protestants in contemporary America before the 2015 Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage. There are multiple ways of trying to take control of a body of law, and for multiple reasons. A group may capture a body of personal law to perpetuate its own values within the group. It may try to control a territorial legal system to impose its values on the entire population. It may work across bodies of personal law to obtain as uniform a result as possible—as if the system were a unified field, not a segmented one. Or its group members may make available their legal expertise to shore up a newly independent state’s legal system. The essay suggests that taking control of a body of law does not necessarily mean hijacking it.
