The Legacy of Empire: The Common Law Inheritance and Commitments to Legality in Former British Colonies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this Article, we examine the colonial experiences of eight formerly British-controlled territories—Barbados, Jamaica, Botswana, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Burma, and Singapore—to identify how the processes and policies of the colonial enterprise affected their respective contemporary rule of law outcomes. While acknowledging the legal origins thesis that the British transplantation of the common law to its colonial territories conferred upon such recipient societies the institutional tools necessary and sufficient to promote the subsequent achievement of strong development outcomes, we note the diversity of modern rule of law indicators among former British colonies and question what heretofore unexplored dynamics of the colonial institutional environment may explain such divergent results. Based upon our investigations of the various governance models employed by the British, and, more significantly, the degree of responsiveness to citizen needs such institutional arrangements provided, we identify two features of colonial administration and legal transplantation whose anecdotal significance suggests to us some theoretical importance for these factors in the promotion of a long-run, stable commitment to legality in these countries (or lack thereof): (1) the degree of representation in legislative bodies afforded to the indigenous population; and (2) the extent to which indigenous and British common law courts and animating values were integrated, fostering the development of a localized common law jurisprudence. In this way, we not only seek to explain how the colonial experience influenced subsequent rule of law outcomes in these eight countries, but also to employ the lessons of the past to inform our current understanding of the dynamics of institutional development, particularly in the legal arena.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".