BRIEF HISTORICAL ANECDOTES OF THE NEPALESE LEGAL AND JUSTICE SYSTEM
Nepal has been the youngest 'republic' in the world. The monarchy that existed at least for 1500 years is eliminated in 2008. According to the history, Nepal as a nation exists for at least 2000 years. While historically it existed as a 'confederation of several smaller principalities', with considerable autonomy, it remained integrated and independent all throughout the history. Nepal remained independent even during the 'British colonial regime in India'. During most of the period in history, the Kathmandu Valley has been Nepal's political, economic, and cultural center. The valley's fertile soil supported thriving village farming communities, and its location along trans-Himalayan trade routes allowed merchants and rulers alike to profit. Since the fourth century, the people of the Kathmandu Valley have developed a unique variant of South Asian civilization based on Buddhism and Hinduism. One of the major themes in the history of Nepal has been the transmission of influences from both the north and the south into an original culture.
The long-term trend in Nepal has been the gradual development of multiple centers of power and civilization and their progressive incorporation into a varied but eventually united nation. The Licchavi (fourth to eighth centuries) and Malla (twelfth to eighteenth centuries) kings may have claimed that they were overlords of the area that is present-day Nepal, but rarely did their effective influence extend far beyond the Kathmandu Valley. Indeed, they ruled through their subordinate lords, which gradually grew into forms of varied principalities. By the sixteenth century, these principalities emerged as smaller kingdoms in several numbers. It was the destiny of Gorkha, one of these small kingdoms, to conquer its neighbors and finally unite the entire nation in the late eighteenth century. The energy generated from this union drove the armies of Nepal to conquer territories far to the west and to the east, as well as to challenge the Chinese in Tibet and the British in India. Wars with these huge empires checked Nepalese ambitions, however, and fixed the boundaries of the mountain kingdom. Nepal in the late twentieth century was still surrounded by giants and still in the process of integrating its many localized economies and cultures into a nation state based on the ancient center of the Kathmandu Valley.