Community Courts and Postcolonial Legal Pluralism

Community Courts and Postcolonial Legal Pluralism PDF

Author: Tina Lorizzo

Publisher:

Published: 2024

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781003453505

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"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"--

Community Courts and Postcolonial Legal Pluralism

Community Courts and Postcolonial Legal Pluralism PDF

Author: Tina Lorizzo

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-02

Total Pages: 109

ISBN-13: 1040011063

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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.

Legal Pluralism Explained

Legal Pluralism Explained PDF

Author: Brian Z. Tamanaha

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-03-03

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0190861584

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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.

African Customary Justice

African Customary Justice PDF

Author: Pnina Werbner

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-29

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1000519015

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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.

The Oxford Handbook of Global Legal Pluralism

The Oxford Handbook of Global Legal Pluralism PDF

Author: Paul Schiff Berman

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-09-24

Total Pages: 1133

ISBN-13: 0197516742

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

Legal Pluralism

Legal Pluralism PDF

Author: M. B. Hooker

Publisher: Oxford : Clarendon Press

Published: 1975

Total Pages: 634

ISBN-13:

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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.

Legal Pluralism and Shari’a Law

Legal Pluralism and Shari’a Law PDF

Author: Adam Possamai

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 1134922132

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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.

Legal Pluralism and Development

Legal Pluralism and Development PDF

Author: Brian Z. Tamanaha

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-05-28

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1107019400

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Previous efforts at legal development have focused almost exclusively on state legal systems, many of which have shown little improvement over time. Recently, organizations engaged in legal development activities have begun to pay greater attention to the implications of local, informal, indigenous, religious, and village courts or tribunals, which often are more efficacious than state legal institutions, especially in rural communities. Legal pluralism is the term applied to these situations because these institutions exist alongside official state legal systems, usually in a complex or uncertain relationship. Although academics, especially legal anthropologists and sociologists, have discussed legal pluralism for decades, their work has not been consulted in the development context. Similarly, academics have failed to benefit from the insights of development practitioners. This book brings together, in a single volume, contributions from academics and practitioners to explore the implications of legal pluralism for legal development. All of the practitioners have extensive experience in development projects, the academics come from a variety of backgrounds, and most have written extensively on legal pluralism and on development.

Postcolonial Politics and Personal Laws

Postcolonial Politics and Personal Laws PDF

Author: Rina Verma Williams

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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Placing the contemporary discussion on personal laws in India in historical perspective, this important book views the debate as a critical component of Indian democracy. Balancing the imperatives of multiculturalism, national integration, and gender justice, it affirms that there is a complex continuity between the terms of the debate in the postcolonial Indian state and its colonial counterpart.

Fictions of Justice

Fictions of Justice PDF

Author: Kamari Maxine Clarke

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009-05-25

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0521889103

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