SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In this chapter, the author purposely override the private/public divide in law, which is another one of those ‘completely suspect’ axioms of legal theory that prevent creative thinking about new migration developments and their legal impacts on us. The phenomenon of South–North migration constitutes a fairly recent phase of human migration history which had tended to be mainly in the North–South direction for several centuries, and involved the colonial subjugation of almost the whole world by mainly European powers. A comparison of English common law and continental legal systems demonstrates nothing but alternative methods of including or excluding ‘the other’, which both result in anguish over maintaining the porous boundaries between official law and unofficial law in Chiba’s terms. The British strategy appears to be to ignore such demands and thus to keep the Asian and African legal demands outside the formal legal sphere, leading to a growth in unofficial laws.