LEGAL PLURALISM IN THE NORTHERN STATES OF NIGERIA: CONFLICT OF LAWS IN A MULTI-ETHNIC ENVIRONMENT
LEGAL PLURALISM IN THE NORTHERN STATES OF NIGERIA: CONFLICT OF LAWS IN A MULTI-ETHNIC ENVIRONMENT
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Date
1976-01
Authors
YUSUF, AHMED BEITA
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Abstract
Legal anthropologists have been paying limited
attention to legal pluralism. In the few works where this
problem is broached, however, the issues of internal conflict
of laws and related socio-legal processes are usually underscored.
This essay is therefore partly designed to fill this
gap in anthropological literature.
In the six Northern States of Nigeria, three interacting
systems of law are identified: the Shari'a (applying
mainly to the Moslem population), Customary law (a blanket
term for the legal traditions of about 250 ethnic groups in
the region), and General law (British-based and continually
modified by Nigerian enactments). Ethnic heterogeneity
Moslem conquest and Islamization, and British colonial rule
are held to be the principal sources of the legal pluralism.
Although the three different bodies of law have also been
complementing one another (as in certain branches of law),
their parallel existence in the region has been largely
characterized by conflicts and inconsistencies.
The essay is divided into seven chapters. The first
spells out the problem, objectives, methodology, and theoretical
formulations of the dissertation. It also reviews relevant
previous works, and then discusses certain assumptions behind
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the research and how these assumptions guided the entire
study. Chapter Two presents an overview of multi-ethnicity,
along with a detailed description of the sources, structure,
and application of Islamic law. Chapter Three examines
substantive and procedural law of crime in three indigenous
societies. In general, ethnic legal traditions seem to display
a remarkable commonality in a number of fundamental
respects. Chapter Four discusses the structure and historical
development of General law; particular attention is given to
some internal judicial reforms which have yet to eliminate
entirely the inadequacies of the plural legal system. In
Chapter Five, mixed-cause cases are used to illustrate the
nature and direction of conflict-of-law situations. Chapter
Six examines the general characteristics of mixed-cause litigations
and the question of choice of law (or court). Tabulating
some 450 legal actions, it is shown that the locales
of mixed litigations are more urban than rural, and that
choice of law is still being determined largely by ethnic
(religious) considerations. Chapter Seven summarizes the
thesis, and then examines the relevance of the study both to
the viability of (Northern) Nigeria as a multi-ethnic unit, and
to theory and method in legal anthropology.
Because of the preponderance of legal inconsistencies,
and because choice of law is primarily determined by ethnicity,
it is argued that plural societies with persistent institutional
cleavages will benefit more from judicial uniformity than
diversity. It is further maintained that the eventual
restatement and codification of Customary law can hardly
constitute a barrier to legal development; neither is it
likely to hinder the development of "national" body of law
based upon consciously selected and rationally integrated
elements from the different legal traditions.
Description
A Dissertation submitted to the Department of
Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences and
Administration, State University of New
York at Buffalo, in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Keywords
LEGAL, PLURALISM, NORTHERN, STATES, NIGERIA, CONFLICT, LAWS, MULTI-ETHNIC, ENVIRONMENT