"In 1874 the Burma Herald Press published Samuhaddha Vicchedani.1 This Pali title means ?Decisions on the Whole Law.? The work has a Burmese subtitle Myanma taya lan dhammathat kyam which means ?The Dhammathat book that is a Pathway to Burmese Law? or (if we translate taya lan as ?legal principles?) ?The Principles of Burmese Law Dhammathat book.? It consists of 314 pages of Burmese text, within which extracts from sixteen dhammathats are divided into eighteen topical Chapters. The final chapter, for example, deals with the topic of Debt and gives extracts from nine dhammathats about interest rates, sureties, refinancing, and bankruptcy. Daw Than Saw?s translation of that Chapter follows this introduction. Samuhadda Vicchedani is an important source on Burmese legal history, which has been too long ignored. Ryuji Okudaira (in 1979) and I (in 1997) both omitted it from our bibliographies of Burmese law.2 In fact no 20th century source makes mentions of it, though it was always on the shelves of European and American research libraries..."