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Change without Conflict: A Case Study of Legal Change in Tanzania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

M. E. R. Nicholson
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Extract

Lawyers and anthropologists who are equally concerned with scientific and pragmatic questions have called for investigation of specific instances of legal change. Such men as Garland and Roth (1967), Healey (1964), Schiller (1965), Thompson (1968), and Twining (1964) have pointed out the need for concrete facts and figures for use in evaluating particular theories of and hypotheses about the process of legal change. In The Place of Customary Law in the National Legal Systems of East Africa, Professor Twining comments that “it would be of great value to have some intensive studies in depth of the introduction of the new courts system and the unified customary law” in Tanzania (1964: 51). He adds that “it is encouraging to hear that a private research project on similar lines is under way in Sukumaland” (1964: 59, fn. 42).

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 7 , Issue 4 , Summer 1973 , pp. 747 - 766
Copyright
Copyright © The Law and Society Association, 1973.

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Footnotes

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The field research (1963-65) was sponsored financially by the Foreign Area Fellowship Program; subsequent analysis of the data was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (1965-66) and then by J. E. Nicholson, my husband. I wish to thank these sponsors and the government, magistrates and other residents of Tanzania for their most helpful assistance. I am grateful to William Garland of the University of Western Michigan for his constructive suggestions about the draft of this particular work, but I naturally accept sole responsibility for all opinions expressed and conclusions drawn.

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