Between Law and Custom by Peter Karsten - 9780521099196

Between Law and Custom'High' and 'Low' Legal Cultures in the Lands of the British Diaspora - The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 16001900\nAuthor(s): Peter Karsten\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521099196, 978-0521099196\nSynopsis\nWhen British authorities established 'settler' colonies in North America and the Antipodes (New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Fiji) from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, they introduced law through parliamentary statutes and Colonial Office oversight, and they dispatched governors and judges to the colonies. These jurists set aside some aspects of English Common Law to meet the special conditions of the settler societies, but the 'Responsible Governments' that were eventually created in the colonies and the British immigrants themselves set aside even more of the English law, exercising 'informal law' - popular norms -.