Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing the notion of equity and then the notion of legality, and I'm going to do this from the standpoint of sort of Comparative Law between the American Common Law which is taken from the traditions of the English Common Law - sometimes called Westminster Law - but I am going to do it from the American perspective because I'm an American Attorney, that's kind of where I have the most expertise.  

That being said, and the thing to take away from this video is at the end of the day, the Common Law is a very different animal from Thai Law and you could say that Thailand utilizes Civil Law. It does, it's a Civil Law System but even that is kind of a misnomer. Thai Law is unique; Thailand was not colonized; Thailand got through on its own during the Cold War and the First and Second World War where it just kind of charted its own course, got through it, moved on and it does its own thing. It has its own sort of unique body of law.

One thing though that a lot of people and I know that this is sort of a fine point of legal philosophy, it's this notion of equity. And if you go back prior to Henry VIII, you had Ecclesiastical Courts and then you had sort of the Temporal Courts, the Courts held by the Kings and whatnot. The Ecclesiastical Courts, after Henry VIII when he broke apart from the Church, from the Catholic Church and set up the Church of England, they had to do something with these Ecclesiastical Courts so they turned it into what became known as the Court of the King's Conscience or the Chancery Court because those Courts operated in equity. Basically and not to use this in a "woke way", equity at the time meant fairness basically. I guess it sort of still does but now has all this weird connotations added on to it. I am purely talking about this from purely talking about this from a jurisprudential standpoint. So equity would sort of pertain to fairness. Legality you dealt with the Law Courts. If you couldn't find a remedy of law, you would go over and look for a remedy at the Court of the King's Conscience, you would find a remedy in equity, if you could find any remedy at all. Over time, those things got blended together. In the American legal tradition, they did fully intertwine where now judges in America just utilize their powers of making opinions in law and in equity, sort of simultaneously. There are a couple of jurisdictions, I think Tennessee is one of them, that still bifurcates equity and law and has separate Courts for those although I heard maybe even they consolidated up, not sure.

In any event, these are two different notions. That notion of equity does not exist in Thailand, so this is the reasoning behind why when you hear somebody say “well I bought a house for my wife, I expect to get half the money back when we divorce, but the house is in her name.” Well yeah, there's no equity. It is just the house is in her name; legally it's her house. That that's what it comes down to. Again that's very sort of one size fits all sort of analysis, very off the cuff. Again the prevailing facts in a given case like that will dictate how the outcome is. But long story short, you get the concept. It doesn't come down to a notion of fairness, it simply comes down to a notion of Law. That is what's going to operate when you're dealing with things here in the legal system of Thailand.