ABSTRACT
Chapter X. LAW MAKING TURNING from the judging of cases to the making of laws or regulations one finds again that a variety of groups can take part and that a forceful individual can make himself felt. There seems to be no specialised institution for this function and one meets again the fact that a group of people met together for some economic purpose such as a market or some traditional purpose such as a second burial will use the occasion of meeting to discuss public matters. It is as though the res publica were only gradually emerging from the sphere of the kinship group, but if specialised institutions are hard to discover this is not to say that the Ibo do not make and proclaim laws-iti iwu [- - _ -]. Parliament in the Middle Ages in England may, according to some historians, have been a law-declaring rather than a law-making body, but an Ibo community, far from resting on immemorial custom, seems always ready for new departures even to the extent of discussing, as Owerri was doing, the alteration of such apparently fundamental conditions as the rules governing exogamy. In the same way, in the judicial sphere, case law as well as custom is invoked.
