The notion that a statutorily prohibited dispute resolution mechanism can exist in parallel with the formal legal structure, questions the very core of legal legitimacy and indeed, the primacy of the state to make laws. This paper examines the intersections of multiple legal spaces within Sierra Leone’s pluralist legal framework. It assesses how the Freetown “local courts” – the indigenous dispute management forums statutorily excluded from judicial functions under the legal system – persist as an integral part of the socio-economic and legal complexion of Sierra Leone’s capital city, an area where historically, such courts should not even exist. The paper looks at how nimble procedural innovations, such as oath-taking and financial practices, have propelled local courts into a popular terminus for Sierra Leone’s urban population.
Based on 12 months of fieldwork, I will argue in this paper that these procedures, along with the persistence of forums such as local courts, suggests a shifting relationship between the right to make laws and the expectation of recognition of those laws by legal subjects. This relationship no longer guarantees automatic, absolute, top-down compliance in the legal positivist sense. Instead, this swing may point towards an ever-changing space of multiple actors, some lacking statutory endorsement, who are engaged in a constant process of what Christian Lund calls ‘negotiations with the governed’ (2016), in which recognition and authority become mutually constitutive.