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Grassroots Law in Papua New Guinea
Melissa Demian
2023
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The introduction of village courts in Papua New Guinea in 1975
was an ambitious experiment in providing semi-formal legal access to the
country's overwhelmingly rural population. Nearly 50 years later, the
enthusiastic adoption of these courts has had a number of ramifications, some of
them unanticipated. Arguably, the village courts have developed and are working
exactly as they were supposed to do, adapted by local communities to modes and
styles consistent with their own dispute management sensibilities. But with
little in the way of state oversight or support, most village courts have
become, of necessity, nearly autonomous. Village courts have also become the
blueprint for other modes of dispute management. They overlap with other sources
of authority, so the line between what does and does not constitute a
'court’ is now indistinct in many parts of the country. Rather than casting
this issue as a problem for legal development, the contributors to Grassroots
Law in Papua New Guineaask how, under conditions of state withdrawal, people
seek to retain an understanding of law that holds out some promise of either
keeping the attention of the state or reproducing the state’s authority.
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Keywords
- anthropology
- Jurisprudence & general issues
- Law
- New legal realism
- papua new guinea
- Postcolonial law
- Regional & area planning
- Rural planning
- Society & culture: general
- Society & Social Sciences
- Socio-legal studies
- Sociology & anthropology
- Systems of law
Links
DOI: 10.22459/GLPNG.2023Editions