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Treating Law as Knowledge: Telling Colonial Officers What to Say to Africans about Running “Their Own” Native Courts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Sally Falk Moore
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Abstract

This article is presented at two levels throughout. On the surface it is a straightforward historical analysis of a directive to British officers in charge of African courts in the late colonial period, with some African data adduced to sketch the local context into which the British were trying to insert new procedures and practices. On a deeper level the article uses the British colonial occasion to explore widely held cultural assumptions in Anglo-American law about the definability of “justice,” the concept of time and timing in legal affairs, and the complex place of the idea of legitimate, authoritative, and permanent “knowledge” in legal institutions.

Type
Legal Culture and Legal Discourse
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , 1992 , pp. 11 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association.

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References

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