This article explores a primary source of legal studies, case-law, as a form of narrative in the context of indigenous land rights, and considers how this narrative negotiates pre-colonial land claims in a post-colonial context. Its case-study is the South Pacific island country of Vanuatu, a small-island, least-developed, nation-state, where laws introduced under Anglo–French colonial administration are still retained and sit uneasily alongside the customary forms of land tenure which govern ninety percent of all land in the islands. The article looks at the traditional and changing role of narrative presented as evidence by claimants and their witnesses against a context of rapid social and economic change, and asks whether the metamorphosis of narrative signals the future survival or imminent demise of customary indigenous land rights and what that might mean for these island people faced by the pressures of development.

Traditional scholarship has approached Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics mostly as a system of positive ethics. Less attention has been paid to the work’s meta-ethics – the claims Aristotle makes about what any system of positive ethics must say or do in order to count as an ethical theory. In this article, Book One of the Nicomachean Ethics is read not simply as an introduction to Aristotle’s system of positive ethics, but as a statement of distinct meta-ethical principles, which can be evaluated independently of any view that might be taken of his positive ethics. Insofar as Aristotle inscribes his legal theory within his ethical theory, those principles stand as a meta-ethics of law. Under Aristotle’s legal meta-ethics, law necessarily presupposes: (1) a concept of the ‘good’; (2) purpose; (3) dialectics; (4) objectivist ethics; (5) a best constitution; (6) a positive ethics; and (7) a concept of the ‘human’.

In its 2005 Household Survey, Statistics South Africa counted 143,167 children living in child-headed households. The increased numbers of such households is usually ascribed to the death of parents from AIDS, and researchers expect them to increase further in the future. Similar household formations are also found in other Southern African countries such as Zimbabwe, Botswana, Uganda, Lesotho and Tanzania. Although the research indicates that children living in child-headed households usually experience emotional trauma, poverty and problems with accessing education, health care and social welfare grants, the consensus amongst children’s advocates and academics is that placing all such children in institutions, foster homes or adoption is not currently a viable or an optimal solution. The existence of child-headed households and the urgent need to assist children living in them exposes the inadequacy of several common law legal concepts and paradigms. This paper explores some practical and conceptual arguments for assigning family status to child-headed households and for awarding legal capacity to the minors who head these households.

The promulgation of the Turkish Civil Code of 1926, a nuanced translation of the Swiss Civil Code of 1907, has long been celebrated as an exceptionally thoroughgoing instance of ‘legal transplantation’. Despite their pervasiveness, such assessments cloud appreciation of the multifarious power dynamics at work in the Code’s preparation and implementation, especially the mechanisms through which it was made to serve Kemalist ideology’s twofold agenda of ‘modernising’ socio-legal relations while retaining – and, in certain instances, augmenting – those ‘traditional’ practices which early republican legislators and administrators found to be of especial value for their ‘nation-building’ project. The chief objective of this study is to reveal the inadequacies of the Turkish Civil Code’s standard characterisation as a ‘success story’ in comparative legal scholarship. Specifically, I demonstrate that the 1926 Code is best understood as the product of a deeply gendered tension between Kemalism’s dedication to a state-driven programme of national ‘modernisation’ and elements of the ‘tradition’ this programme was crafted for the sake of mobilising, radicalising and transforming.