ABSTRACT
Three major themes, outlined in the Introduction, are arguably entangled in contemporary socio-legal and anthropological debates: customary law as generative of and responsive to ‘living law’ in the face of radical political and legal change; legal pluralism; and the ‘paradox’ of chiefship as a viable institution in African democracies. Our review of these debates discloses another broad interest, neglected in the literature, at the heart of the anthropology of justice: the production of legal subjectivities, analysed ethnographically through hearings and court cases. These highlight the experiential and intellectual dimensions of legal ethics and public morality as they are applied to customary law and law more generally by local actors. We argue that, despite classics in legal anthropology in the 1950s, when law and morality were first shown to be inextricably linked in legal judgements, since then the importance of ethical considerations in legal participation and decision-making in customary courts has been a neglected topic in the growing literature on the anthropology of ethics.
