Recent headlines, often in explicit cold-war terms, have reminded us that for British Guiana (now Guyana), the colonial era ended only yesterday. While the same can be said for several other small populations in the hemisphere, British Guiana’s long colonial history has provided an exceptional opportunity for the comparative legal scholar. There a system of Roman-Dutch law had two centuries to grow before it was gradually, but almost entirely, replaced by the common law of England. This book by the attorney general of British Guiana traces a portion of the colony’s “hybrid legal system” (pp. ix, 289) from the days of the precarious sixteenth-century Dutch settlements to the recent epoch of pre-Independence. The result is both an exhaustive collection of the materials of legal history and an indispensable tool for the practice of land law in Guyana.
Even the Table of Cases is instructive. Case names like In re Plantation Oudsterbeck, D'Aguiar v. Obermuller, and Lalbahdursingh v. McPherson recall the waves of colonization, conquest, and immigration that have swept over the Wild Coast of Brazil. It is not remarkable that much of the Roman-Dutch law survived in British Guiana over a century after the end of Dutch political rule, for the tenacity of Romanist legal systems has repeatedly been demonstrated. In fact Roman-Dutch law is today the law of South Africa and Ceylon. The more interesting question would seem to be why the common law so thoroughly supplanted the Roman-Dutch law in British Guiana.
It is not Ramsahoye’s purpose to furnish comprehensive answers to such questions. Instead he has analyzed the growth of an unusually complex system of rules governing the acquisition and transfer of rights in land. His analysis is careful and technically exacting with the loving attention of a professional to the rabbit’s warren of regulations governing Crown and colony lands. Still, some speculations concerning the displacement of the Roman-Dutch law seem justified on the basis of Ramsahoye’s analysis.
First, legal education in nineteenth-century British Guiana neglected the Roman-Dutch law. Very likely lawyers and judges, trained in the common law, were not merely “incapable of dealing effectively with the Roman-Dutch system” (p. 16); they seem also to have felt a conceptual, doctrinal concern—a lawyer’s concern—with what one judge called “an incongruous medley of Dutch and English legal principles” (p. 16).
Secondly and not insignificantly, a “national” legal system—even in a colony—is an important symbol of political unification. The ease names mentioned above reflect the fact that this is a seriously divided population according to nearly every important index of conflict and consensus. The commissions of 1912 and 1914, which struck the most telling blows at the Roman-Dutch law, echoed, however faintly, a tradition of integration through lawmaking that is at least as old as the Twelve Tables.
And now Ramsahoye proposes a fresh codification, “a comprehensive land code drafted on the basis of settled principles” (p. 300). It takes no special powers to predict that this will happen, and perhaps that it will not be limited to the land law, now that the colony has given way to an independent Guyana. The prediction, it should be stressed, does not depend on the political stripe of the independent government, for the consolidation of the new nation will demand any government’s attention. In California an attempt to codify the common law was a failure, since the courts continued to “interpret” the new Civil Code according to common law principles, leaving it largely ineffective. Guyana appears to be a more fertile ground for codification, especially in its land law. Here some substantial uncertainties remain, and indeed the problem is aggravated precisely because Ramsahoye has so ably pointed it out. (Much good law has been made by bad books, and it is painful to contemplate the converse.) These uncertainties may be turned to the advantage of the codifiers, for the old law which they must supplant is not as much entrenched in the traditions and training of lawyers and judges as the common law was in California. Of course a codified land law for the new Guyana will be a “medley” and a “hybrid”—as what legal system is not ? Nevertheless under Ramsahoye’s leadership it will doubtless be a coherent and secure institutional base for the rational exploitation of that country’s most important resource.
