Legal Pluralism in Contemporary States: Between Traditional and Formal Justice Mechanisms in Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is generally assumed that African states have yet to explore the full potential of their traditional institutions and the specific role that society wants them to play in modern states. While focusing on Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, this empirical research seeks to explore legal pluralism in modern African democracy. The study specifically answers the research question: is the traditional justice system applicable to Nigerians and Ivorians in contemporary dispensation? The study finds out that a significant population at the grassroots rely on the traditional justice system, when compared with their counterparts in the cities. The rural population argues that the formal justice system is quite expensive and that the legal procedures are difficult to understand, coupled with the fact that court houses are mostly located in the cities. On the other hand, the gender-biased and male-dominated outlook of the traditional justice mechanism and its proneness to external influences, as well as the impact of modern religions, have continued to propel a considerable population (especially in urban areas) to patronize the formal justice system. Meanwhile, the adoption of western institutions of government by African states has forced traditional institutions to occupy the back seat. Hence, there is a mixed social environment wherein both formal and traditional justice systems are weak, and the states being weak themselves are significantly responsible for the weakness of traditional institutions. Consequently, flaws in both justice systems have compelled people to take the law into their own hands and to resort to jungle justice.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".