Reconciling Customary Law and Received Law in Melanesia

Reconciling Customary Law and Received Law in Melanesia: The Post-independence Experience in Solomon Islands and Vanuatu

Kenneth Brown

This book adds to the growing body of legal scholarship on Pacific island jurisdictions. One of the main issues in the post-imperial era has been the inter-reaction and relationship between introduced law and customary law. The author looks at this problem in the context of two neighbouring Melanesian jurisdictions, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu and analyses the constitutional provisions dealing with the application of various legal sources. He then examines what has actually happened in practice in the post-independence period with special reference to the law relating to the family and succession and inheritance.

The author was born in England in 1945 and graduated in law from Birmingham University in 1966. After admission as a solicitor he spent most of the 1970s in private practice in Zambia and most of the 1980s in the Solomon Islands where he held two judicial posts before becoming the country''s first Public Solicitor in 1982. Between 1989 and 1995 he held various judicial posts in Bermuda. He arrived in Australia in 1995 and since then has been engaged in research. In 2003 he was awarded a doctorate in law by Charles Darwin University.