Field administrators resisted Dakar’s centralized review of customary law

Evidence

Taken together with the prescriptions of the 1912 reform in matters of criminal justice, and the decision to create ethnic courts, these circle-court rulings represented a clear-cut continuation in Dakar of France’s mission as first defined under Roume. They also seem to indicate that this mission was supported by everyone in the French administrative hierarchy. This impression is not entirely accurate. The response of many of Panty’s subordinates in the field to the expanded role of the prosecutor general, and of the special Chambre in Dakar, was uniformly hostile, as it had been nine years earlier when Roume first instituted the Chambre d’homologation. The new powers of review for civil law cases were “against the spirit of the 1903 decree,” and custom was much too diverse to allow for a single ruling in any given case. “The Chambre,” Lieutenant Governor Clozel of Upper Senegal-Niger argued, “derives its legal science from the judgments rendered by the administrators, which it then aspires to turn around and review. Is there not a measure of incoherence in giving power of appeal to the least informed judge over the best informed one?” — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 445

Categorization

• XREF: Upper-level-vs-field-tension mirrors Milgrom’s law-merchant institutions where the practical knowledge of trading parties conflicts with centralized legal authority; also echoes the principal-agent theme in The Social Control of Impersonal Trust.