Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1975
ISSN
0506-7286
Publisher
Nomos
Language
en-US
Abstract
This paper explores the institutional facilities available to Haitian peasants for the settlement of their disputes. More specifically, it compares the institution of the Chef de Section - the lowest administrative appointee in the Haitian countryside and the Justice of the Peace - the lowest ranking judicial institution provided by the Haitian legal system. The paper further advances the hypothesis that at the present time there is a shift in the division of labor between the two institutions, in favor of the Justice of the Peace, and that this shift may be attributed to processes of social differentiation currently detectable in rural Haiti.
Little research has been done on rural life in Haiti in general, and its legal culture in particular. In this respect, this paper should be regarded only as an introductory invitation to more elaborate and extensive research of Haitian remedy agents. However, the importance of exploring the division of legal labor in rural Haiti goes beyond this contribution to knowledge. Haiti is a fascinating melange of European, African and American-Indian cultures. After the bloody revolution of 1804, in which Haiti gained its sovereignty, French Law was dominant in the newly organized legal system (Jean- Jacques, 1933). Yet the Haitian case was distinctly different from other cases of indigenous reception of foreign law, for the foreign legal system was not brought into an already existing and established indigenous legal culture (Collier, in press; Galanter, 1972), but into a recently liberated slave society, struggling to form its own culture. The Chef de Section and the Justice of the Peace were developed and institutionalized together, repre senting the mixture of distinctive cultural elements in the Haitian legal culture, a mixture characteristic of most other aspects of Haitian social life (Mintz, 1966: xxii). The shift in the division of labor between these two institutional facilities is further interesting because both have co-existed for the last 170 years. Hence, we witness here an invariant set of legal levels, the usage of which is beginning to change, so that as the one becomes more popular, the other declines (Collier, 1973: 51).
Recommended Citation
Pnina Lahav,
The Division of Legal Labor in Rural Haiti
,
in
8
Verfassung und Recht in Übersee VRÜ
465
(1975).
Available at:
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5771/0506-7286-1975-3-465
Included in
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