The Three Faces of Justice: Legal Traditions, Legal Transplants, and Customary Justice in a Multicultural World

Abstract

This research explores the institutional and procedural architecture that enables or limits access to formal and informal dispute settlement mechanisms to resolve simple disputes among individuals in developing countries.

The central argument is that the urban poor (including newly arrived migrant peasants and members of indigenous communities) in developing countries, are unable to keep their traditions and ancestral dispute settlement mechanisms alive in big cities, while they are also unable to understand and utilize what to them are abstruse legal procedures of the formal courts. A proposal is made at the end of the dissertation, which includes a novel conceptual framework to analyze the problem of deficient delivery of justice (formal and customary) to the urban poor, and a methodology to quantify the multiple dimensions of the same problem in low and middle-income countries throughout the world.