UC Irvine Law Review

This Article discusses the self-regulation of social life by inmates inside a Venezuelan prison. I focus on the development and use of intragroup indigenous norms, and institutions and processes, to handle individual and collective disputes arising out of social interactions between inmates, including the adjudication and enforcement mechanisms that ensure the effectiveness of the system. This article contributes to the emerging literature on private governance vis-à-vis state regulation and the factors that contribute to foster law-abiding behavior among those who are routinely seen at odds with the official legal system.

This paper considers legal pluralism on the Swahili Coast by looking at marital dispute resolution among Muslims in Zanzibar, Tanzania. The state of Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous island polity of Tanzania, has its own semi-independent legal system, which includes Islamic courts for family disputes for Muslims. Through investigating legal pluralism from the point of view of lay people and their day-to-day legal practice, the paper argues for studying legal pluralism from the ground up, thus building on calls from Caplan and Dupret for socio-legal scholars studying legal pluralism to ask “what is the law” through the eyes of everyday people. In particular, I aim to show how different legal actors—primarily lay people—recognize and apprehend this pluralism and compare their often very different arguments about the ramifications and consequences of such pluralism. The paper draws on ethnographic data, interviews, and documents from rural Zanzibari Islamic courts and the surrounding community.