Building the Rule of Law

Rating:
Summary: Lacking in Original Insights
Review: "Building the Rule of Law" by Jennifer Widner is a post-colonial history of the judiciaries of the common law countries of eastern and southern Africa, with special emphasis given to Tanzania and the country's former chief justice, Francis Nyalali. When he retired, Nyalali was the longest serving chief justice in the region and a man highly regarded around the world as a staunch advocate of judicial independence and the rule of law.

It's Nyalali's life that Widner attempts to use to articulate her work. Given the limited nature of her biographical study of Nyalali, it would have been better if she had just admitted that this was an inquiry into judicial systems in Africa and not a biography of Francis Nyalali.

Widner accomplishes her goal of displaying the region's current situation and, for the most part, how each country got to where it is. For instance, Uganda was affected mostly by the civil wars that have raged there since independence, South Africa has had the legacy of Apartheid to overcome, Botswana has been blessed with an almost ethnically homogenous population and respect for judicial independence, Zimbabwe has overcome its own Apartheid-like rule but has since slipped back into an authoritarian system even with a highly respected judiciary, Zambia suffered from a lack of exploitable resources, and Tanzania has had the struggle of uniting a country sharply divided along religious lines.

Widner's study of the region's judiciaries is solid but not terribly insightful. I guess many of the things which plague the region's courts should be easy to determine: lack of money, lack of legal knowledge by the populace, authoritarian one-party governments, civil wars, etc; so, Widner's elucidation of them is not very revealing.

"Building the Rule of Law" is a good primer for someone who has limited knowledge of the region under study. Had the book put greater emphasis on Nyalali, I would recommend it for that reason; but, readers with any substantial knowledge of the region can be forgiven for looking past this work.

Rating:
Summary: Lacking in Original Insights
Review: "Building the Rule of Law" by Jennifer Widner is a post-colonial history of the judiciaries of the common law countries of eastern and southern Africa, with special emphasis given to Tanzania and the country's former chief justice, Francis Nyalali. When he retired, Nyalali was the longest serving chief justice in the region and a man highly regarded around the world as a staunch advocate of judicial independence and the rule of law.

It's Nyalali's life that Widner attempts to use to articulate her work. Given the limited nature of her biographical study of Nyalali, it would have been better if she had just admitted that this was an inquiry into judicial systems in Africa and not a biography of Francis Nyalali.

Widner accomplishes her goal of displaying the region's current situation and, for the most part, how each country got to where it is. For instance, Uganda was affected mostly by the civil wars that have raged there since independence, South Africa has had the legacy of Apartheid to overcome, Botswana has been blessed with an almost ethnically homogenous population and respect for judicial independence, Zimbabwe has overcome its own Apartheid-like rule but has since slipped back into an authoritarian system even with a highly respected judiciary, Zambia suffered from a lack of exploitable resources, and Tanzania has had the struggle of uniting a country sharply divided along religious lines.

Widner's study of the region's judiciaries is solid but not terribly insightful. I guess many of the things which plague the region's courts should be easy to determine: lack of money, lack of legal knowledge by the populace, authoritarian one-party governments, civil wars, etc; so, Widner's elucidation of them is not very revealing.

"Building the Rule of Law" is a good primer for someone who has limited knowledge of the region under study. Had the book put greater emphasis on Nyalali, I would recommend it for that reason; but, readers with any substantial knowledge of the region can be forgiven for looking past this work.