SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This work is an exercise in practical comparative law. It examines how justice is administered in a unitary State with two extraneous legal systems, the common law and the civil law. The whole work is divided into six main parts. Part One explores the phenomenon of law in pre-colonial societies and explains how Cameroon came to have two extraneous legal systems. The German, French and British systems of colonial justice in Cameroon are critically discussed in Part Two. Part Three takes the machinery of justice as its focus of inquiry. It begins with a survey of the constitutional setting and them proceeds to deal with the courts system and the outward manifestation of the legal order - the magistracy and the legal profession. Part Five treats the administration of criminal and military justice while Part Four concentrates on those branches of the civil law on which there is now a common substantive law and procedure, namely, labour law, le contentieux administratif, and customary law. Part Six rounds off this study with an examination of a number of topical issues - human rights, law reform, legal education, and the cost of justice. The entire thesis runs to twenty chapters. Style and treatment have not been the same in all of them. Nor has an attempt been made to give equal space and attention to each part or chapter - as if one were dividing an academic cake into symmetrical slices. There are topics which call for and have received more detailed analysis than others.