In Namibia, as in many other parts of Africa, customary law continues to play an important role for ordinary people, by setting the framework of behaviour that the law expects of them and, in return, what protections they can expect from laws. This role is today increasingly under challenge from the growing importance of constitutional law.

The textual form of law relates to language and not to narration but to myth. Law's text does not develop in the temporal sequence of past-present-future, but spreads by analogy of concentric circles. If ‘normal’ myth is a folklore of people then the law is a myth retold by lawyers. For the sake of separation of legal myth from mythology as a whole, law creates its own rituals. In post-modern societies the mythologization of law becomes even more important as the (...) boundaries between legal and lay communities are challenged. Classical legal theories cannot deal with this change and Kafka's The Trial is as good a jurisprudence as any other legal theory. (shrink)

In Namibia, as in many other parts of Africa, customary law continues to play an important role for ordinary people, by setting the framework of behaviour that the law expects of them and, in return, what protections they can expect from the law. This role is today increasingly under challenge from the growing importance of constitutional law.

A critical discussion of Kelsen's philosophy of law.