A Conceptual Framework for Regulating Customary Law within Pluralistic African States: Reassessing Justice Sector Reforms for Reconciling Legal Traditions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Customary law and traditional institutions once constituted the comprehensive legal system regulating a wide spectrum of activities within African states. However, colonialism created a framework for the politics of legal dualism, which led to a process of transformation and shift in the nature of structures and practices of states. As such, now independent states are constantly trying to identify ways to sustain the cultural heritage reflected in customary laws and institutions, as they attempt to also function as modern democratic states. Scholars have highlighted the practical and structural changes that need to be made to ensure effective regulation of customary law. To this work, my paper provides a framework to supplement current judicial reforms within African states. I argue that for customary law to be effectively used as a mechanism for legal regulation within cultural communities, the current legal framework within African states needs to move beyond the idea of legal recognition and tolerance, to one that reconciles the complexities of different legal traditions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".