Question

Read the following passage.

In the study of colonial administration in the early to mid-twentieth century, a contentious scholarly debate centers on the codification of indigenous customary law. For decades, the dominant view, championed by a group known as institutional formalists, was that the transcription of unwritten indigenous traditions into standardized statutory codes represented a progressive step toward modern governance. The formalists argued that by replacing the highly situational and often unrecorded rulings of local elders with a uniform legal text, colonial administrations provided rural populations with a predictable, transparent jurisprudence that ultimately extended fundamental legal rights.

More recently, however, subaltern legal historians have vehemently challenged this narrative. They contend that the very act of fixing fluid, context-dependent customs into immutable text fundamentally altered the nature of those traditions. By codifying custom, subaltern historians argue, colonial authorities stripped indigenous dispute resolution of its adaptive flexibility and transferred interpretative power from local communities to colonial magistrates. In this view, codification was not a beneficent extension of rights but a mechanism of state control that froze dynamic cultural practices into rigid rules.

While the subaltern historians offer a vital corrective by exposing the coercive dimensions of colonial legal frameworks, their wholesale dismissal of codification risks oversimplifying the historical reality. This perspective often neglects the extent to which indigenous populations actively navigated and manipulated the newly formalized courts, using the standardized statutes to adjudicate disputes in ways that advanced their own social and economic interests.

Based on the passage, the institutional formalists would be most likely to agree with which one of the following statements concerning unwritten indigenous legal traditions?