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Inventing Market Property: The Land Courts of Papua New Guinea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Robert D. Cooter
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Abstract

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This article reports field research on Papua New Guinea's land courts, which decide property disputes in customary law. Customary law did not contemplate exchange of real property outside the kin group. Changing conditions have created an irresistible pressure for markets in land, which require extending law to encompass exchange with outsiders. The freehold solution is to give absolute, unitary ownership over land to individuals and end the kin group's role in resource allocation. Alternatively, the kin group can be reconstituted as a cooperative with ownership rights. If imposed by legislative fiat, either of these solutions will disrupt the customary economy by displacing its incentive system. A better solution allows custom to evolve and modernize itself through the common law process.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , 1991 , pp. 759 - 801
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

My research in Papua New Guinea was sponsored by the Institute of National Affairs in Port Moresby and financed by a grant from the Asia Foundation. I would like to thank Leonard Joy, Richard Giddings, John and Jocelyn Millett, Tony Power, and Michael Trebilcock for help in organizing my trip. I am grateful to Jeremy Waldron and Wolfgang Fikentscher for useful discussions about theories of property and to Saul Levmore, Robert Scott, and Charles Goetz for discussions of relational contracting. My interest in this topic was partly inspired by Michael Trebilcock's (1984) “Communal Property Rights: The Papua New Guinea Experience.” Useful comments were received from members of the Yale Workshop in Legal Theory, the University of Virginia Law Faculty Colloquium, the University of Pennsylvania's Law and Economics seminar, Peter Larmour, and the reviewers of this journal. Robert Mullen assisted with the manuscript's preparation.

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