What Lex Understands

A legal research tool that merely finds words is a concordance. What the practising lawyer requires is something that comprehends the architecture of the law.

How statutes relate to one another, which authorities bind and which merely persuade, when a later enactment supersedes an earlier one, and how the elegant complexity of Sri Lanka's legal inheritance actually operates in practice.

Lex was built to understand these things. Not perfectly — no system is perfect — but with the kind of structural awareness that makes the difference between finding a case and finding the right case.

I. The Mixed Legal Heritage

Sri Lanka possesses one of the most sophisticated mixed legal systems in the world. This is not a matter of national pride; it is a matter of fact, and of considerable practical consequence.

The foundation is Roman-Dutch law — the legal tradition of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, carried to Ceylon by the Dutch East India Company and never entirely displaced. When Sri Lankan courts require authority on matters of delict, property, succession, or the law of persons where statute is silent, they turn not to English precedent but to the great Dutch institutional writers: Voet's Commentarius ad Pandectas, Grotius's Inleydinge, Van Leeuwen's Het Roomsch-Hollandsch Recht. These are not historical curiosities. They are living law.

Upon this foundation, the British colonial administration layered English common law principles — particularly in commercial matters, criminal procedure, and the law of evidence. The result is a legal system that speaks two ancestral languages, sometimes in the same judgment.

And above both stands the Constitution of 1978, the supreme law, with its distinctive approach to judicial review and its careful preservation of personal law systems that predate the Republic itself.

Lex understands this architecture. When you search, you search within a system that recognises these layers and their relationships.

II. The Hierarchy of Laws

Every legal system has a hierarchy. Sri Lanka's is distinctive, and Lex is built to comprehend it.

Lex Superior: The Higher Law Prevails

The Constitution stands supreme. Article 3 vests sovereignty in the People; Article 4 elaborates its exercise through Parliament, President, and courts. No Act of Parliament, no regulation, no by-law may contradict the Constitution — with the remarkable exception of Article 84, which permits Parliament, by two-thirds majority, to enact legislation inconsistent with certain constitutional provisions without formally amending them.

Lex understands constitutional supremacy. When you research a statutory provision, the system recognises where that provision sits in the hierarchy and what constraints bind it.

Lex Posterior Derogat Priori: The Later Law Repeals the Earlier

When Parliament enacts a new statute that conflicts with an older one, the newer prevails. This ancient principle — traceable to the Digest of Justinian — governs how Sri Lankan courts resolve conflicts between enactments of different vintages.

Lex tracks legislative succession. When a Gazette notification amends or supersedes earlier law, the system understands the relationship. You will not be offered authorities that have been silently overtaken by subsequent enactment.

Lex Specialis Derogat Legi Generali: The Specific Prevails Over the General

This maxim carries particular weight in Sri Lanka, where personal law systems — Kandyan, Thesawalamai, and Muslim — govern specific communities in specific matters, overriding the general law that would otherwise apply. When a question of inheritance arises, the answer depends not only on the facts but on which legal system governs the parties.

Lex recognises when special law displaces general law. The system does not treat all authorities as equivalent; it understands that context determines applicability.

III. The Grammar of Precedent

Not all judicial statements carry equal weight. The practising lawyer knows this instinctively; Lex knows it systematically.

Ratio Decidendi and Obiter Dictum

The ratio decidendi — the legal principle upon which a decision actually turns — binds future courts. The obiter dictum — observations made in passing, not essential to the judgment — may illuminate but does not compel. Sri Lankan appellate courts have repeatedly emphasised this distinction; in the Kusum Kanthilatha and Nandawathie cases, the Supreme Court specifically criticised lower courts for giving prominence to obiter while ignoring ratio.

Lex is designed to help you identify what actually decided the case, not merely what was said along the way.

Stare Decisis in Sri Lankan Practice

The doctrine of precedent operates distinctively here. Supreme Court decisions bind all lower courts — this is settled. Court of Appeal decisions bind first-instance courts unless inconsistent with Supreme Court authority. But pre-1978 Supreme Court decisions and Privy Council decisions from the colonial era serve as guidance rather than strict precedent, reflecting the constitutional transformation of independence.

Lex understands these gradations. When you research a point of law, the system can help you distinguish between what binds and what merely persuades.

Res Judicata: The Matter Already Judged

A question finally determined by a competent court cannot be reopened between the same parties. Section 406 of the Civil Procedure Code enshrines this principle, and Sri Lankan courts apply it rigorously — as demonstrated in Azem Morina v. Saman Weranjan Kasthurirathna, where the Supreme Court held that even a Magistrate's Court settlement could bar subsequent claims.

Lex helps you identify when a matter has been conclusively determined, preventing wasted effort on arguments already foreclosed.

IV. The Personal Law Systems

Sri Lanka's legal pluralism is not a relic; it is a living reality that affects thousands of matters each year. Three distinct personal law systems govern specific communities in matters of marriage, divorce, property, and succession.

Kandyan Law

Applicable to Buddhists whose ancestry traces to the former Kandyan provinces before the 1815 Convention, Kandyan Law preserves distinctions unknown to the general law. The difference between binna marriage (husband joins wife's family; wife retains inheritance rights) and diga marriage (wife joins husband's family; wife's inheritance rights to paternal property are affected) determines outcomes in succession disputes to this day — as the Supreme Court affirmed in Wickramasinghe Mudiyanselage Peiris Singho v. Wickramasinghe Mudiyanselage Menikhamy (2021).

Lex understands the Kandyan Law framework. When you research inheritance or matrimonial matters involving Kandyan parties, the system recognises which principles apply.

Thesawalamai

The customs of the Jaffna Tamils, codified by the Dutch in 1706-1707 and validated by Regulation No. 18 of 1806, govern Tamil inhabitants of the Northern Province — and, crucially, their property wherever situated in Sri Lanka. The Supreme Court in Sivagnanalingam v. Suntheralingam (1988) established that only unequivocal evidence of abandonment of Jaffna inhabitancy removes a person from Thesawalamai's scope.

The system's distinctive property categories — thediathetam (jointly acquired property), mudusam (husband's separate property), seedhanam (wife's dowry property) — carry consequences that general law does not recognise.

Lex is built to understand when Thesawalamai applies and what its application means.

Muslim Personal Law

Muslim Personal Law governs all Muslims in Sri Lanka in matters of marriage, divorce, maintenance, and succession — administered through the Quazi court system established under the Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act of 1951. The Muslim Intestate Succession Ordinance of 1931 applies rules derived from the deceased's school of jurisprudence, whether Shafi'i or Hanafi.

Notably, general legislation does not override Muslim Personal Law in its areas of application. Adoption under the general Adoption Ordinance, for instance, does not confer inheritance rights to a Muslim parent's estate — Muslim law does not recognise adoption for succession purposes.

Lex recognises the boundaries of Muslim Personal Law and helps you navigate its distinctive requirements.

V. The Commonwealth Connection

Sri Lankan courts do not exist in isolation. When domestic authority is sparse or silent, practitioners and judges alike turn to persuasive precedent from jurisdictions whose legal heritage intersects with our own.

United Kingdom: The colonial inheritance. English decisions remain persuasive in commercial law, criminal procedure, and statutory interpretation.

India: A fellow inheritor of British legal structures, with a Supreme Court whose jurisprudence on constitutional matters frequently illuminates Sri Lankan questions.

Australia and New Zealand: Commonwealth jurisdictions whose courts have grappled with similar questions of statutory construction, administrative law, and human rights.

South Africa: Our sibling in Roman-Dutch heritage. When Sri Lankan courts require guidance on the institutional writers — on Voet or Grotius or Van Leeuwen — South African jurisprudence often provides the most directly relevant analysis.

Lex includes extensive case law from these jurisdictions precisely because Sri Lankan practitioners need it. This is not comprehensiveness for its own sake; it is practical necessity recognised and addressed.

VI. The Scholarly Tradition

Sri Lanka has produced legal scholars of international distinction — jurists whose work shapes not only domestic practice but global jurisprudence.

The tradition of Justice Christopher Weeramantry, whose scholarship on contract law remains definitive and whose work on the International Court of Justice brought Sri Lankan legal thinking to the world stage. The foundational texts of Professor H.W. Tambiah on Sinhala customary law. The constitutional scholarship of Professor G.L. Peiris. The pioneering work of Professor Savitri Goonesekere, whose analyses are among the few local scholarly works regularly cited by the Supreme Court itself.

Lex draws upon this tradition. The textbooks and commentaries within the archive are not random selections; they are the works that have shaped how Sri Lankan law is understood and practised across generations.

VII. What This Means for Your Practice

When you ask Lex a question, you are not querying a simple search engine. You are consulting a system built to understand:

That a 1920 Ordinance may have been superseded by a 1985 Act, and that the 1985 Act must be read subject to the 1978 Constitution.

That a Supreme Court dictum, however eloquent, does not carry the same weight as its ratio.

That a question of inheritance may be governed by Kandyan Law, Thesawalamai, Muslim Personal Law, or the general law — depending on facts the system helps you identify.

That a South African judgment on rei vindicatio may be more directly useful than an English one, because both Sri Lanka and South Africa inherit the same Roman-Dutch foundations.

This is what Lex understands.

The thinking, however — the judgment, the strategy, the wisdom that comes from years of practice — that remains yours. As it should. As it must ෴