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Population Density, Land Tenure, and Law in the New Guinea Highlands: Reflections on Legal Evolution
Author(s) -
Podolefsky Aaron
Publication year - 1987
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1987.89.3.02a00030
Subject(s) - new guinea , land tenure , land law , population , geography , law , political science , history , demography , sociology , ethnology , archaeology , agriculture
This paper examines law in the New Guinea Highlands through a cross‐cultural, case‐study approach. Because of low levels of variation in ecology and infrastructure, the Highlands become a natural laboratory for testing theoretically derived hypotheses relating legal complexity and the evolution of law to population density, agriculture, and property ownership. The predicted variation in legal process fails to emerge and thus the hypotheses are not supported. The uniformity of process will be encouraging to policymakers involved with developing a national legal system based on customary law.