A Problem in the Reception of Foreign Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Lawrence Friedman (1969: 29) has written that “many basic questions of the relationship of law to social change and to cultural development have been completely neglected. … How does law brighten or darken the road to political… stability. … What happens when laws are borrowed from more advanced countries?” This paper examines the reception of English administrative law in Anglophonic Africa in an effort to discover some general propositions to answer Professor Friedman's questions.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I am indebted to Professor Y. P. Ghai and Mr. Aki Sawyerr for helpful comments, although errors are, of course, mine. I am grateful to the Russell Sage Foundation and to the Graduate Research Fund of the University of Wisconsin for support in writing this article, which was originally written for a Festchrift in honor of Thomas Hodgkin.