RUI: Legal Pluralism and the Emergence of Legal Culture in Hawaii

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Despite the central importance of law in legitimating colonialism, there has been only limited work on the role of law in the colonization process. This project examines processes of domination and resistance surrounding the imposition of American law during the colonization of Hawaii in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Colonialism is conceptualized as a struggle among the interests of various foreign groups and those of indigenous peoples. The struggle, located in the courts as well as in the schools, the market, the churches, and the institutions of government, will be analyzed in the context of the culture and politics of the colonizer and the colonized. The project includes a comparison of New England lower courts to provide a contrast in which cultural patterns are more similar and in which there is no colonial heritage. The analysis will examine differences between Hawaii and New England, searching for the implications of the historical use of law as a mode of discipline and control by the colonial government and the extent to which present patterns of court law and forms of legal consciousness are the legacy of Hawaii's historical experiences with colonialism. This research promises to advance our understanding of legal pluralism as a dynamic process. In particular, the study should illuminate the ways in which indigenous and imposed legal cultures interact and transform one another and the relative influence of coercion, ideology, and example in that process. Also, the project should contribute to the analysis of culture as a series of competing discourses or contradictory elements rather than an integrated or continuous entity. Finally, since Hawaii posed a continuing problem for the United States because it was both strategically valuable but culturally and racially different, this study will provide an opportunity to explore the colonial discourse of race, identity, cultural diversity, and law in the United States.