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.

Unlike other federally assisted public welfare programs, the Aid to Dependent Children program has periodically been subjected to sharp political and journalistic attack. The themes of these attacks center around assertions that the program has encouraged illegitimacy and contributed to an increasing number of female-centered families. Bound up in such criticism is the suggestion that the parents of many, if not most, of the children receiving public assistance are unworthy of it by reason of their conduct or their notions of proper conduct. Also included in this anti-ADC ideology are the sloganlike propositions that many poor women have illegitimate children simply to become eligible for ADC payments and that they have additional children to obtain increased payments. A closely related assertion is sometimes made that the availability of ADC payments, or the way in which they are administered, causes many men to abandon their families or to live separately but nearby, and that the program in this way promotes and perpetuates matrifocal family patterns.

Sociological perspectives in the study of law have a long history in German scholarship. As early as the beginning of the nineteenth century the “Historical School of Jurisprudence” had insisted that the law is embedded in the developing patterns of social and cultural life, and that this aspect should guide the analysis of law as well as govern legislation. Still, it was only during the decades before and after 1900 that more specifically sociological analyses began to appear. German jurisprudence was not characterized by close contact and intimate interaction with social and economic reality. Among the reasons for this were the following:

1. (1) the coexistence of regionally fragmented and relatively traditional legal practice with legal scholarship shaped by the tradition of Roman law;

2. (2) the relative segregation of legal personnel by class and subculture from people without a university education and from business and enterprise; and

3. (3) the dominant role of government bureaucracies, staffed mainly by lawyers, which in many instances did not have to be particularly responsive to the demands of new groups with interests in the law.

One of the traditional themes running through the literature on urban renewal is that the residents of urban renewal areas are universally opposed to being relocated. Relocation is described as being destructive of community subcultures which provide a viable social milieu for the residents. It is argued that the term “slum,” denoting a disorganized social structure and apathy on the part of the residents, is a misnomer (Gans, 1962; Jacobs, 1961; Glaser, 1968). Urban renewal areas, it is said, represent unified neighborhoods for some ethnic groups, though not for all (Gans, 1965: 30-31). Among the most eloquent spokesmen for this point of view have been those who researched and made famous Boston's West End. Thus Herbert Gans wrote of the feelings of urban renewal victims (Gans, 1965: 29):

The “marihuana problem” has rapidly degenerated into the “marihuana muddle.” As the use of marihuana increases, and as this use expands into the middle and upper classes, officials are increasingly confronted with questions concerning the effects and dangers of marihuana. Unfortunately, the answers that can be given are limited. We really do not know very much about marihuana. Perhaps the most decisive point that can be made is that the possession and sale of marihuana are against the law.

The most frequent and visible sources of judicial policy are decisions in court cases in which judges create new solutions to problems and conflicts presented to them. Sometimes important policies are established in a single case or policy may develop gradually in a series of cases dealing with similar situations. This form of policy-making frequently occurs without much direct interaction between courts, legislatures, and executive agencies. Though the implementation of court policies may depend on the cooperation of other officials, the initiation and early shaping of a particular policy may be done almost exclusively by the courts.

Very different assumptions guide the efforts of social scientists and comparative legal scholars interested in the development process. These assumptions form paradigms; the paradigms guide and structure research problem selection, choices of concepts to be used, and even the form and content of evidence held to be admissible. For instance, a political scientist may treat the legal system of a transitional society as the outgrowth or a function of cultural, social, economic, and political environment, but the legal scholar may not be comfortable with this wholly dependent placement of his analytic slice of “reality.” Social scientists increasingly accept basic aspects of the value system of science. This requires a concern for making generalizations which may be linked to theoretical constructs, and which are empirically testable in such a way as to allow intersubjective evaluation. Description, explanation, and prediction are typically cited as a social scientist's aims. “Relevance” is a term we hear much of today, but unless a social scientist is content to ignore the imperatives of the value system of science, relevance must remain a fundamental, from that of the social scientist. A. Singham's work furnishes an opportunity to reflect on these considerations.