The Baldy Center Blog Post 53
Blog Author: Mekonnen Ayano, Associate Professor of Law
Post Title: "Politics, Tradition, and Practice of Law and Rural Development: Observations from Fieldwork"

Field observations in Ethiopia’s law and rural development context suggest that the new “customary” courts are less a revival of tradition than a response to the failures of bureaucratic legality.

I returned to Ethiopia this past summer, supported by a grant from UB’s Office of International Education, to continue fieldwork for a research project on the intersections of law and rural development. My research examines how law works in practice, and how the lived realities of law differ from the abstract promises found in statutes, codes, policy papers, and donor reports.

This time, what caught my attention was Ethiopia’s new customary courts.

Ethiopia has moved through more political and economic experiments in a few decades than many countries experience in a century. The military (socialist) government that ousted Haile Selassie’s monarchy in 1974 collapsed in 1991, followed by the "Washington Consensus” structural adjustment programs that promised economic growth, industrialization, peace, and prosperity. However, as in many “post-socialist” societies, those promises remain largely unfulfilled, leaving the country caught between the drive for legal standardization and the persistence of local variation.

Post–Cold War liberalism offered a simple formula for countries like Ethiopia: staff an independent judiciary with neutral, professional judges, write rules that are simple but detailed, and stability and prosperity would follow through entrepreneurship and market exchanges. It is an intellectually compelling image. But anyone who works on law and development knows that the real world rarely cooperates with such abstractions.

This gap has become visible in Ethiopia’s recent experiment with customary courts. Two years ago, Ethiopia’s Oromia region created a vast network of customary courts, more than 7,000 of them. Other regions soon copied the experience, giving the initiative a national reach. On the surface, the initiative was framed as a revival of indigenous tradition, a return to values of communalism, spirituality, and moral order.

A closer look, however, tells a different story. These courts were not born from local communities, village elders, or popular demand. They were conceived and designed by judicial specialists within the judiciary of Oromia. Facing a judiciary overwhelmed by dockets that grew by 15 percent each year, and a public increasingly skeptical of judges accused of corruption or incompetence, the legal experts sought a solution. Political officials, meanwhile, worried about unrest and saw in the customary courts a means to restore confidence and stability.

Customary court judges are called Abba Gada, borrowing a title from the Oromo’s traditional Gada system. Gada once organized society through rotating leadership, age-sets (cohort groups that advance together through stages of social and political responsibility), and elaborate governance norms. By invoking it, the new courts gained cultural and moral legitimacy far beyond their bureaucratic origins.

Customary court judges are unpaid and elected by community members. They are expected to be elected from among those regarded as wealthy, wise, and trustworthy. Their authority rests on reputation and moral standing rather than professional training. This stands in stark contrast to salaried state judges, often seen as distant from everyday life.

The philosophy of customary courts diverges sharply from that of formal courts. Their jurisdiction is limited to civil matters without any pecuniary limit, making them entirely different from the familiar small claims courts. Typical disputes before them involve land, contract, labor, and family, except for the decision of divorce. Procedural formality is minimal. Cases may be filed orally, and witnesses are not permitted. Instead, truth is sought through ritual ordeals that blend belief and conscience. Disputants may be asked to swear before spiritual authorities or symbols that signify the risk of cosmic punishment if they lie. This is not evidence in the modern legal sense; it is a moral and psychological process designed to compel honesty. To some, this is unsettling; to others, it is accessible because no paperwork and fees are required. Lawyers are not allowed to practice in these courts, formal law is inapplicable, and there is no uniform customary law on which the courts rely to decide disputes.

The customary courts occupy different meanings in different domains. In politics, they are celebrated as a cultural revival that promises to restore national authenticity and order. Officials praise them as a corrective to the moral decline of modernity and an antidote to local tensions. Within the judiciary, they are viewed as a pragmatic fix, relieving crushing caseloads and calming critics. In communities, they are both accessible and coercive, sites where justice is immediate but where the ritual search for truth can be psychologically intense.

This layered reality shows how a single institution can mean very different things depending on where you stand.

Ethiopia’s customary courts may have lightened the load of formal courts, satisfied politicians’ desires, and delivered accessible justice to citizens. In Oromia alone, the new customary courts have decided nearly half a million cases, easing the pressure on formal courts.  However, because they rely on rituals and unpaid judges whose authority derives from community respect, not professional training, questions arise about the sustainability of the design.

These courts also capture the paradox of law in Ethiopia. They are modern institutions that survive because they wrap themselves in the language of tradition. They illustrate how new forms of legality emerge at the intersection of state crisis, political anxiety, and cultural imaginations.

Ethiopia’s experience raises bigger questions. What is a judiciary for, technical neutrality, or local social peace? The two goals may not always align well. Can a court invented by judicial experts and cloaked in the language of tradition truly be called customary? And what does this tell us about the limits of transplanting liberal legal models into societies with different social realities? And how does it align with the broader program of standardizing the local variations in property and contract relations in the interest of a free market and economic development?

In the end, the initiative seems less about reviving custom or tradition than about restoring a sense of equity amid the abuse, opportunism, and discontent that pervade the formal bureaucratic legality promoted by Western donors and international development lenders.