The Ethiopian civil code project: reading a ‘landmark’ legal transfer case differently

© 2018 Dr. Hailegabriel Gedecho FeyissaThe 1960 Ethiopian Civil Code is the largest legal transfer project into 20th century Ethiopia. Considered as one of the ‘landmark’ cases of ‘voluntary reception’ of western law in a non-western country, it has been studied by students of legal transfer, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. This thesis responds to calls for the re-examination of the legal transfer project that sailed through radically different times – times that saw the emergence in Ethiopia of successive political regimes with their own ideologically-driven legal modernisation projects. It critiques and provides an alternative account to existing scholarship on the Ethiopian Civil Code project. It examines how contests over the nature of state and society relationships in Ethiopia (1890s-2010) have shaped the project. In order to do undertake this study, I develop an approach that spatially and temporally relativises Ethiopia’s experience with the legal transfer project and, rejects the modernist assumptions, methodologies and questions, which informed existing scholarship on the Ethiopian Civil Code project. Drawing on the case of the codification and implementation of, and pedagogical approaches to, Book III and the inter-temporal and inter-spatial contests thereof, the thesis argues the Ethiopian Civil Code, a familiar ‘poster’ of legal transfer failure in a non-western nation, is not the failure it is usually depicted to be by existing scholarship. Indeed, my approach avoids the question of success or failure altogether. Adopted and incorporated by Christian Amhara landed elites engaged in their own local project of imperialism, the Ethiopian Civil Code was a product of Ethiopia’s contested semicolonial legal modernity. Despite persisting through three different historical times and continuing to influence local practices, the Ethiopian Civil Code project is still subject to ongoing contestation and reinterpretation. As such, it is a repository of Ethiopia’s competing and entangled modernisms and imperialisms