EQUITY IN COLONIAL WEST AFRICA: A PARADIGM OF JURIDICAL DISLOCATION

2006 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
KWAME AKUFFO
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law

In English law, equity is assigned relatively benign and comfortable roles, functioning as a canon of interpretation of the common law; as its versatile and flexible help-mate and mitigator of its formal strictness. More than this, equity claims a moral justice or conscience function that is deeply embedded in legal culture. As a consequence, equity has been extremely successful in lubricating the machinery of English law, providing it with a ready means of change to meet the needs of the dominant actors within society. This justice function is, however, contradicted by equity's history and its practical functioning, particularly, within the British colonial experience. This article examines the effect of the imposition of English equity on the prevailing customary law systems in colonial West Africa. The analysis challenges the fundamental claim of equity to a moral justice function within the colonial regime and argues that equity served the imperial objective as an instrument for fragmenting and dislocating indigenous property systems in order to facilitate the installation of capitalist property forms.

FILIATION AND ADOPTION AMONG MUSLIMS IN INDIA: THE QUAGMIRES OF A RELIGIOUS MINORITY LAW

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Philippe Dequen
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Religious Minority ◽  
Vast Number ◽  
Adoptive Family ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Common ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Personal Law

AbstractFiliation among Muslims in India is governed by Muslim personal law, a largely uncodified corpus of key Islamic legal treatises that has subsequently been interpreted and applied through the Common Law frame of British colonial courts and the post-Independence Indian judicial system by virtue of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act 1937. Muslim personal law recognizes only legitimate filiation resulting from a valid or irregular marriage, barring illegitimate children from maintenance and intestate succession and prohibiting adoption. However, a number of legislative enactments have modified key aspects of the law of filiation among Muslims: shifting the presumption of legitimacy arising from a valid marriage to the time of the wedding, rather than the time of conception; invalidating the doctrine of dormant fetus; and lifting certain disabilities incurred from illegitimacy. Further, although adoption based on customary law is somewhat common in India and has been recognized by courts, its effect among Muslims has tended only to lift the bar to paternal succession and seldom creates filiation with the adoptive family. Notwithstanding, following the enactment of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2000 and its subsequent amendments, an optional secular legal framework for adoption is now available to Muslim prospective parents. The procedure set forth by the Act is nonetheless unwieldly and implementation faces the very practical difficulties of the state in managing and protecting the vast number of destitute and abandoned children in India, for the most part with an unknown filiation.

scholarly journals Interpreting change through legal culture: the case of the Irish exclusionary rule

Legal Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Claire Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
Exclusionary Rule ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
The Common ◽  
Law Of Evidence

Abstract The changes to the Irish exclusionary rule introduced by the judgment in People (DPP) v JC mark an important watershed in the Irish law of evidence and Irish legal culture more generally. The case relaxed the exclusionary rule established in People (DPP) v Kenny, one of the strictest in the common law world, by creating an exception based on ‘inadvertence’. This paper examines the decision through the lens of legal culture, drawing in particular on Lawrence Friedman's distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ legal culture to help understand the factors contributing to the decision. The paper argues that Friedman's concept and, in particular, the dialectic between internal and external legal culture, holds much utility at a micro as well as macro level, in interrogating the cultural logics at work in judicial decision-making.

Common Lawà l'americaine

1966 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 562-579 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. M. Apelbom
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
British Occupation ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law ◽  
Considerable Body ◽  
Clear Line

Eighteen years after attaining independence Israel remains essentially a common law country. Introduced by the British Mandatory administration to supplement the Ottoman legislation in force at the time of the British occupation of Palestine, the common law has been retained by the Israeli legislator, so far as not modified or replaced by local legislation. But this common law, far from being residual only, also embraces a considerable body of interstitial law developed by two generations of judges, British, Palestinian and Israeli, in the process of applying and interpreting statute law—whether Ottoman, Mandatory or Israeli—according to common law methods. On the other hand the importation of common law institutions was neither wholesale nor systematic and in a number of fields no clear line of demarcation can be drawn between domestic and English law.

Nature Versus the Common Law

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David B. Schorr
Keyword(s):  
Common Law ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Water Law ◽  
Public Ownership ◽  
Normative Force ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law

This article recovers a debate, played out over the course of a century, in courts across the « common law world », over whether nature had normative force in water law. It explores areas of water law, such as the extent of public ownership in rivers and the effects of shifting watercourses on ownership, in which some courts, not without controversy, departed from the established rules of English law in order to make rules more appropriate, as they saw it, to the local environment.

The Approach to European Law in Domestic Legislation

2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (12) ◽  
pp. 1255-1275 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Leible
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
European Law ◽  
Legal Professionals ◽  
Domestic Legislation ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
Broad Interpretation ◽  
Teleological Interpretation

National legislators approach European law very differently. The reason for these differences lies partly in the historical development of their individual legal cultures. If one pursues a broad interpretation of the term ‘legal culture’ one takes especially into account the style of law and the attitude toward it. Thus legal culture can be defined as the Continental civil law countries’ ideal of a “concise, but comprehensive codification by which the judge can derive solutions for all possible cases through teleological interpretation;” whereas the common law rather limits this concept to “special laws which are interpreted very narrowly by the courts and accordingly are designed by the legislator to the last detail”. Furthermore, one could include the status of a judge, the nature of legal discourse, or the training of legal professionals, as well as the respect accorded to the law by the population when defining the concept of ‘legal culture'.

scholarly journals THE PROBLEM OF THE NON-JUSTICIABILITY OF RELIGIOUS DEFAMATIONS

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 241-257 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Smith
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Civil Case ◽  
Magna Carta ◽  
The Common ◽  
English Law

English law has long held the principle that religions should be free from interference by the state in certain matters. The original 1215 edition of the Magna Carta proclaimed, as its first article, ‘THAT WE HAVE GRANTED TO GOD, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired.’This article was intended to protect the established Catholic Church from the powers of the state, specifically from interference in church elections by the executive in the form of the person of the monarch. The notion that religions were institutions with practices and beliefs that were outside the control of the state in certain respects was adopted by the common law and is found in modern times in the principle of non-justiciability on the matter of religion in certain types of civil case. 

Brase’s Case

Virginia 1619 ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 236-255
Author(s):  
Paul D. Halliday
Keyword(s):  
Customary Law ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
English Law

This chapter reconsiders the foundations of slave law in Virginia in the years immediately following 1619. In contrast to prevailing trends in English law, the colonial experience in Virginia granted justices extensive discretion in the application of English legal traditions, and they used this discretion to craft a customary law of slavery long before the articulation of formal statutes regulating the treatment of enslaved people. This chapter offers a detailed case study of how this process worked by examining the case of Brase, an African man captured from a Spanish ship and brought to Virginia in 1625. It recovers the legal innovations that the justices developed to ensure that Brase would be held in bondage despite the lack of a formal law of slavery in Virginia.

Family Provision in New Zealand and Australia

2020 ◽  
pp. 450-476
Author(s):  
Nicola Peart ◽  
Prue Vines
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Indigenous Populations ◽  
Sex Partners ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Reproductive Techniques ◽  
The Common ◽  
Over Time

New Zealand and Australia are named in that order in the title because New Zealand was the first to develop the discretionary family provision jurisdiction, in 1900, that now applies in New Zealand, Australia, and much of the common law world. This allows courts to make awards to family members from the estate of the deceased. Originally benefitting only the surviving spouse and children, family provision has extended the rules of eligibility in line with changes in the meaning of ‘family’. So as well as spouses, claims can also, in many of the Australasian jurisdictions, be made by civil partners, cohabitants, and same-sex partners. Most jurisdictions have also broadened the class of eligible children to include grandchildren and stepchildren who were being maintained by the deceased as well as children born of new reproductive techniques. Both New Zealand and Australia have significant indigenous populations and their eligibility to claim family provision is modified to accord with their customary law. Over time, the courts have adopted a much broader view of a deceased’s ‘moral duty’ to his or her family, particularly in regard to claims by adult children. The size of awards has increased correspondingly. The chapter discusses this development, as well as the increasing relevance of Indigenous customary law and how the courts deal with disentitling conduct. In view of the greatly expanded scope of family provision in New Zealand and Australia, testamentary freedom may be only an illusion in these jurisdictions.

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