ISBN 0-903067-42-0
Published: February 2002
Price: GB£25 plus postage
Jennifer Corrin Care is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the
University of Queensland
At independence, many Pacific island nations choose to recognise the importance of their traditional legal processes by conferring on customary norms the constitutional status of formal, state law. However, more than a quarter of a century after most of these constitutions were drafted, state law consists primarily of statutes and the imported common law. Unlike the common law, custom is hard to find and harder to prove. In most Pacific jurisdictions, customary law must be pleaded and proved as if it were not law but fact. To do that, counsel must marshal convincing evidence of custom’s existence; not an easy thing to do when the ‘facts’ are unwritten norms that are either so old they exist only as memory and hearsay or so new they exist only as changing behaviour patterns. This title aims to encourage common law courts to use custom as a standard by which to decide cases. It is an invaluable aid to understanding the difficulties that courts have in finding custom and also to evaluating the efficacy of the various means devised to assist the courts in this endeavour.
Proving Customary Law in the Common Law Courts of the South Pacific includes:
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Analysis of statutes and case law governing the pleading and proof of custom |
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Discussion of the constitutional provisions and statutes that indicate how courts should find custom in the South Pacific |
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Analysis of recent cases |
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Suggestions for future policy and practice |
COPIES ARE AVAILABLE NOW BY MAIL ORDER FROM:
The British Institute of International and Comparative Law
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To order a review copy, please contact Olivia Skinner via email: o.skinner@biicl.org