Indigenous Law

Indigenous law is the category applied to the norms and legally binding practices of thousands of distinct indigenous communities spanning six continents. This chapter focuses on the content and construction of indigenous law within the borders of the present-day United States, equally marked by diversity among Native communities. Nonetheless, it identifies several important ways in which indigenous law broadly construed diverges from Euro-American legal systems. The chapter notes that indigenous communities have not drawn sharp distinctions between law and other methods for maintaining the proper ordering of society. And, while cautioning against essential accounts of Native justice, it also observes the ways in which Native dispute resolution focuses more on community and restoration than Anglo-American adversarial models. The chapter also recounts constructions of indigenous law by North America’s would-be European colonizers. It describes the long-standing practice by many colonizers of describing indigenous peoples as lawless. This language, the chapter argues, did important work in justifying colonization and the imposition of Anglo-American law. But it also traces the ways in which Native peoples forced Anglo-Americans to incorporate indigenous laws into US law. This incorporation happened both informally—as Anglo-Americans negotiating with Native nations adopted their rules to govern negotiations—and formally, as the body of law known as federal Indian law created a regime of legal pluralism that granted limited recognition to Native nations’ assertions of jurisdiction. The chapter concludes by noting the dangers of adopting the colonizers’ frame and defining indigenous law principally as a foil for Anglo-American law.

Berber Law by French Means: Customary Courts in the Moroccan Hinterlands, 1930–1956

As the French conquered Muslim lands in their nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century quest for empire, they encountered multiple and sometimes mixed judicial systems among the native populations. In many places, legal codes were shaped by eitherfiqh, meaning Islamic law, one component of which is customary law, or by non-Islamic custom, or some combination of the two. To administer native justice in French colonies and protectorates, officials sorted through this multiplicity in order to standardize procedures, principles, and punishments. The standardization of customary law codes, whether written or oral prior to submission to themakhzan(the central Moroccan government, lit. “storehouse”) under the Protectorate, required that French officials both maintain pre-contact codes and create new institutions to administer and monitor them. Through new judicial bureaucracies, the French transformed indigenous law. Customary law was a “residual category” in the sense that it consisted of what remained after colonial powers ferreted out what they considered morally offensive and politically objectionable. Legal codification involved what Vincent calls “a compromise between those recognized as leading elements in indigenous societies and the colonial administrators who co-opted them.” Yet customary law, “if understood as allowing local people to do their own cultural ‘thing,’ should also be understood to have been a carefully restricted fragment of ‘tradition.’” This tradition when manifest as customary law “implies that there is a different kind of law with which it can be contrasted,” making customary law “the ongoing product of encounters between subordinate local political entities and dominant overarching ones.” In such encounters the distinction made between custom and law has long preoccupied legal historians, as well as anthropologists, colonial administrators, and importantly, lay people. Throughout French African colonies and protectorates, this distinction was key to the French usurpation of social institutions, as was true in British overseas territories as well.

The Award of Compensation in Criminal Cases in East Africa

In East Africa the traditional division of “native justice” on the one side and “English law” on the other is gradually disappearing. Within the foreseeable future it is possible to visualize a single system of law administered by one judiciary. The fusion of customary law and modified English law has been, or is being, achieved with a remarkable lack of friction. Generally speaking, however, customary law has had to make greater sacrifices in achieving the fusion than its more powerful brother, the common and statutory law of the three states. The latter has made a few minor concessions; for example, when customary criminal law disappeared in Uganda in 1964, the Penal Code was amended to admit adultery as a statutory offence. Adultery had been an offence among all the different tribes in Uganda. But it is usually customary law which has had to change to achieve a single system of law.