Can there be benefits from competing legal regimes? The impact of legal pluralism in post-conflict Sierra Leone

Pedro Naso, Erwin Bulte and Timothy Swanson

No 56-2017, CIES Research Paper series from Centre for International Environmental Studies, The Graduate Institute

Abstract: We investigate the impact of competition between legal regimes on the number of authoritative acts and amount of fines occurring in rural Sierra Leone. We model state and traditional legal systems as competing authorities with a potential for overlap in their jurisdictions. We are interested in the sign and magnitude of the legal pluralism externality in this region of overlapping authority. We then test the model and estimate the size of the externality coefficient in the context of post-conflict Sierra Leone. Our results show a negative externality between regimes for civil disputes—that is, an increase in the cost of apprehending a person. We also show that there is a reduction in the amount of fines per dispute collected in this shared space. Overall, this indicates that a potential benefit to the local people from multiple competing regimes is a reduction in expected authoritative expropriation.

Keywords: Legal Dualism; Enforcement Externalities; CivilWar; Africa. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 K42 O17 P48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2017-10-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gii:ciesrp:cies_rp_56

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