Community Courts and Postcolonial Legal Pluralism PDF Download

Author: Tina Lorizzo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781032592046
Category : Criminal justice, Administration of
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Focusing on the role of community courts in Mozambique, this book offers a postcolonial perspective on legal pluralism. In Mozambique, judicial courts are distant and expensive and legal terminology is incomprehensible to the majority of people. As such, Mozambicans continue to rely on different normative systems to resolve their disputes - systems that have always been considered as closer, cheaper and faster than judicial courts. This book analyses the functioning of community courts in the Mozambican capital city of Maputo. As it considers how the past shapes the relationship of the state with community courts, the book uncovers the Eurocentrism of mainstream discourses and practices of criminal justice. In response, it develops a postcolonial account of legal pluralism. Arguing that community courts may therefore be seen as the form of an otherwise neglected local knowledge, the book maintains their overlooked importance in improving widespread access to criminal justice. This book will be of value to scholars working in the areas of legal pluralism and postcolonialism, as well as others with interests in criminal justice"--

Author: Tina Lorizzo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040011063
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 109

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Book Description
By focusing on the role of community courts in Mozambique, this book offers a postcolonial perspective on legal pluralism. In Mozambique, judicial courts are distant and expensive, and legal terminology is incomprehensible to the majority of people. As such, Mozambicans continue to rely on different normative systems to resolve their disputes – systems that have always been considered to be closer, cheaper and faster than judicial courts. This book analyses the functioning of community courts in the Mozambican capital city of Maputo. As it considers how the past shapes the relationship of the state with community courts, the book uncovers the Eurocentrism of mainstream discourses and practices of criminal justice. In response, it develops a postcolonial account of legal pluralism. By arguing that community courts can therefore be seen as the form of an otherwise neglected local knowledge, the book discusses their overlooked importance in improving widespread access to criminal justice. This book will be of value to scholars working in the areas of legal pluralism and postcolonialism and others with interest in criminal justice.

Author: Brian Z. Tamanaha
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190861584
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Legal pluralism involves the coexistence of multiple forms of law. This involves state law, international law, transnational law, customary law, religious law, indigenous law, and the law of distinct ethnic or cultural communities. Legal pluralism is a subject of discussion today in legal anthropology, legal sociology, legal history, postcolonial legal studies, women's rights and human rights, comparative law, international law, transnational law, European Union law, jurisprudence, and law and development scholarship. A great deal of confusion and theoretical disagreement surrounds discussions of legal pluralismwhich this book aims to clarify and help resolve. Drawing on historical and contemporary studiesincluding the Medieval period, the Ottoman Empire, postcolonial societies, Native peoples, Jewish and Islamic law, Western state legal systems, transnational law, as well as othersit shows that the dominant image of the state with a unified legal system exercising a monopoly over law is, and has always been, false and misleading. State legal systems are internally pluralistic in various ways and multiple manifestations of law coexist in every society. This book explains the underlying reasons for and sources of legal pluralism, identifies its various consequences, uncovers its conceptual and normative implications, and resolves current theoretical disputes in ways that are useful for social scientists, theorists, jurists, and law and development scholars and practitioners.

Author: Pnina Werbner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000519015
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations. Taking Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year period, the book shows, the ‘customary’ is robustly enduring, central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the country’s past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British colonial period of indirect rule to the postcolonial state’s present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of legal subjectivities. The book will be valuable to Africanists but also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change, public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of politics and judicial decision making.

Author: Paul Schiff Berman
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0197516742
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 1133

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Book Description
"Abstract Global legal pluralism has become one of the leading analytical frameworks for understanding and conceptualizing law in the twenty-first century"--

Author: M. B. Hooker
Publisher: Oxford : Clarendon Press
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 634

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Book Description
This study describes the plural systems of those states retaining an indigenous law which have had imposed, or have adopted into themselves, Western laws- such as those inherited from colonial empires or adopted voluntarily in, for example, Turkey, Thailand, and Ethiopia. Attention is also given to the revolutionary change of law in the U.S.S.R and China. Many issues of practical importance are involved in pluralism, includind those of modernization and development of law for economic and development of law for economic and social purposes, as well as conflicts of law and legal theory.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004696741
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 514

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Book Description
This collection challenges the prevailing conflict of laws approach to the interaction of state and indigenous legal systems. It introduces adaptive legal pluralism as an alternative framework that emphasises dialogue and engagement between these legal systems. By exploring a dialogic approach to legal pluralism, the authors shed light on how it can effectively address the challenges stemming from the colonial imposition of industrial legal systems on Africa’s agrarian political economies.

Author: Adam Possamai
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134922132
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
Legal pluralism has often been associated with post-colonial legal developments especially where common law survived alongside tribal and customary laws. Focusing on Sharī‘a, this book examines the legal policies and experiences of various societies with different traditions of citizenship, secularism and common law. Where large diasporic communities of migrants develop, there will be some demand for the institutionalization of Sharī‘a at least in the resolution of domestic disputes. This book tests the limits of multiculturalism by exploring the issue that any recognition of cultural differences might imply similar recognition of legal differences. It also explores the debate about post-secular societies specifically to the presentation and justification of beliefs and institutions by both religious and secular citizens. This book was published as a special issue of Democracy and Security.

Author: Nonso Okafo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317070275
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Drawing on data from a cross-section of postcolonial nations across the world and on a detailed case-study of Nigeria, this book examines the experience of recreating law and justice in postcolonial societies. The author's definition of postcolonial societies includes countries that have emerged from external colonial rule, such as Nigeria and India as well as societies that have overcome internal dominations, such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Suggesting that restructuring a system of law and justice must involve a consideration of the traditions, customs and native laws of a society as well as the official, often foreign rules, this volume examines how ethnically complex nations resolve disputes, whether criminal or civil, through a combination of formal and informal social control systems. This book is unique in its concern with how the average citizens of a postcolonial society can play more active parts in their nation's law and justice, and how modern and increasingly urban societies can learn from indigenous peoples and institutions, which are more informal in their approaches to problem-solving. The concluding chapter looks at the possibility of an increased role for civil as opposed to criminal response in the social control system of a postcolonial society.

Author: Kamari Maxine Clarke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521889103
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This book explores how notions of justice are negotiated through everyday micropractices and grassroots contestations of those practices.