African Law(s)

Abstract

The book presents a critical rethinking of the study of law in Africa from a comparative law perspective and proposes a new approach on how to consider law in Africa. It highlights the inadequacies of current Western theoretical perspectives in comparative law, especially for studying African law, arguing that they are too eurocentric to fully catch the peculiarities and characteristics of the African “lawscape”. The common thread of the present work is that of consider law in Africa from a different perspective. The aim of the proposed approach is to demonstrate that the African legal culture can be considered at the same level of the Western one, so that – being deeply rooted in the culture of the African people – it may have a proper space in the future policy making decision relating legislative development in Africa. The argument is that the Western and the African approach to law should be combined in a collaborative perspective to create a new, interactive approach to legal pluralism in Africa that puts the African legal culture at the center of the African “lawscape”.