Biography

Terry Brathwaite is Coventry Business School's Founding Programme Director for the world's first MSc Degree in Global Development & International Law, which was launched at Coventry University in the UK. A prominent speaker on Comparative Law in a Global Development Context, he has also held Visiting Lectureships at Harvard University (Boston, USA), The University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), CENTRUM Católica Business School (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú – Lima, Peru), The National Normal University of Taiwan (Republic Of China), The International Business College (Denmark), The American International University (London), The University of Exeter, and The University of Birmingham in the UK.

Article Title

From slavery to the CCJ: Hiero-historical & historiographical foundations for freedom from the shackles of the privy council

Abstract

This paper explores the lego-political genesis of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) positing both a hiero-historical (meta-cognitive) and historiographic (cognitive) dialetic as its main element of enquiry. The essential inference was that the non-Westerners who came to the Caribbean were deemed to have brought no ‘living laws’ with them. Thus, misled by this faulty premise, many of the Caribbean intellectuals who were able to travel abroad and engage directly with the Western legal traditions, used their new-found knowledge upon repatriation to create functional post-independence legal systems infused with European positivism for the Caribbean milieu. Of course, they were largely encouraged by the compelling and importunate arguments (particularly from the former colonial directorate), that devoid of proper indigenous laws, the Caribbean chthonic community should modernise out of their destitute conditions with a sense of urgency, if they wished to attain true self-governance. However, these home-grown legal systems underpinned by so-called colour-blind, culture-neutral notions of Eurocentric lego-political traditions of sovereignty, and perpetuated by colonial mentorship, demonstrated a severe deficiency of plurality-consciousness on the part of the consulting legal architects in understanding both the hiero-historical and historiographical natures of the non-Western customary laws, which still prevail to this day through the resilience of the transplanted African Disaporic community and their diverse folklore/law cultures and languages. The paper therefore highlights the inherent dangers and pitfalls confronting post-independence (English-speaking) CARICOM Governments, who continue to nurture laws very much in accordance with British jurisprudence. It also asserts that since our regional post-colonial societies have been developing differently from the English, a robust re-examination of our legal culture and recognition of the CCJ is now required in order to render our Caribbean Community & Common Market (CARICOM) constitutions and common laws more meaningful.