The Baldy Center Blog

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.

The Baldy Center Blog Post 52 
Blog Author: Claudia B. Villegas Ramos, LLM candidate
Blog Title: Sovereignty and Indigenous Law through the lens of Social Dominance Theory

What if federal Indian law is not failing, but operating precisely as intended? That was the central argument of Michalyn Steele’s recent talk, “Social Dominance Theory and the Supreme Court’s Federal Indian Law Jurisprudence,” presented on September 19, 2025, as part of The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy’s Distinguished Speaker Series.

Steele, a citizen of the Seneca Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and a leading scholar in Federal Indian Law, studies jurisprudence through the lens of Social Dominance Theory, a framework that proposes that institutions do not merely reflect social hierarchies but actively create and maintain them. Applied to federal Indian case law, Steele argued, this theory reveals a consistent pattern: rather than protecting tribal sovereignty, U.S. law often reinforces white dominance, all under the appearance of constitutional neutrality.

In this view, Indigenous nations have survived not because of federal law, but in resistance to it. Even in Supreme Court decisions that are overall detrimental to tribal interests, Native advocates have had to search for small, strategic victories. This dynamic reflects a larger theme in Indigenous survival, one that relies on adaptation, and on strategic legal reinterpretation. But it also raises a deeper question: can justice for Indigenous peoples truly be built with tools designed for their domination?

Steele emphasized that tribal sovereignty is a political, not racial, construct and must be recognized as such to safeguard tribal authority. She criticized the continued reliance on blood quantum requirements and Certificates of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB), which she argued reduce Indigenous identity to racial categories while undermining their sovereignty. While the federal government may rely on such criteria, Steele noted that tribal membership is fundamentally a matter of political status determined by the tribe itself. She warned that framing Indigenous identity in racial terms opens the door to legal challenges that could erode tribal sovereignty.

She also offered a broader Indigenous perspective on sovereignty, one rooted in responsibility rather than domination. In many Native languages, the closest term to "sovereignty" suggests accountability to the community and to future generations. Tribal leaders often invoke sovereignty as a right to self-governance, not as an absolutist power, she explained. Still, the term bears the weight of colonial legacy in U.S. law. Justice Clarence Thomas, for instance, consistently argues that tribes are not sovereign in any meaningful constitutional sense, asserting that any such status was extinguished through conquest. In this view, sovereignty is binary. Tribes either have it, or they do not.

Indigenous legal advocates, however, often take a more nuanced position. Tribes may not have full sovereignty as recognized under international law; they may exercise internal jurisdiction but lack external recognition. Thus, this model still operates within a legal system fundamentally structured to limit Indigenous autonomy.

The more fundamental critique, which Steele alluded to, is whether the legal concept of sovereignty, imposed and inherited by U.S. law, can truly serve Indigenous autonomy ends. Is it possible to use a system built on colonial dominance to achieve justice for Indigenous nations?

She pointed to McGirt v. Oklahoma, 591 U.S. 894 (2020) as a case that illustrates the complexity of this dynamic. In McGirt, the Supreme Court affirmed that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s reservation still legally exists, rejecting a century of state and federal assumptions that it had been disestablished. Justice Gorsuch’s opinion focused strictly on statutory language, rejecting arguments based on the racial or demographic composition of the region. While the decision was a legal win for tribes, Steele cautioned that it remains fragile and subject to changes in judicial philosophy and political climate.

Reflecting on older precedents such as Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823), Steele offered a nuanced view. While Johnson denied tribes full ownership of their lands, it may have unintentionally helped some tribes retain territory. Wherever Native land became fully alienable, especially during the allotment era, it was often lost entirely. In contrast, tribes that were restrained from selling their land, due to restrictive ownership rulings, have more often maintained cultural and political continuity.

Steele uses this paradox to make a larger point: survival alone is not justice. The fact that some tribes endured through these contradictions should not be seen as a success of the system but as a testament to Indigenous resilience in spite of it. While some oppressive rulings have accidentally helped tribes survive, the system itself was never intended to protect or support true Indigenous sovereignty.

Ultimately, Steele’s presentation revealed the limitations of working within a legal system built to contain, rather than empower, Indigenous nations. Survival has been achieved, but at great cost. The challenge now is not merely to survive, but to envision forms of governance, justice, and community that transcend colonial legal logic. As Steele reminded the audience, the embers of sovereignty still burn, but to ignite a lasting change, they need to be fueled by Indigenous traditions, values, and self-determined visions for the future.

Claudia B. Villegas Ramos is studying the Master of Laws (LLM) Cross-Border program at the University at Buffalo School of Law. A graduate of the Autonomous University of Juárez City and a dedicated attorney in Mexico, she has passionately worked for gender equality, human rights, public policy, and social justice across governmental institutions, non-profits, and the private practice.

Villegas Ramos holds a Master’s in Social Sciences with a focus on Public Policy and Political Studies. Her dissertation examined territorial conflicts between an indigenous community and the government in her hometown, which she presented at the Latin American Council of Social Sciences within the “Rights, Classes, and Reconfiguration of Capital” working group. Villegas Ramos' academic journey spans the globe, with studies at prestigious institutions such as the Harvard Kennedy School for Government, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, the University of Seville in Spain, the University of Quilmes in Argentina, and the Greater University of Saint Andres in Bolivia.

Fluent in English and Spanish, with conversational French and knowledge of Italian and Portuguese, Villegas Ramos brings a rich linguistic and cultural perspective to her work. In the US she has worked in removal defense, particularly for asylum seekers, and she was granted accreditation by the Department of Justice to represent clients in immigration relief applications with Citizenship and Immigration Services. Upon completing her LLM, Villegas Ramos plans to sit for the bar exam and seek licensure to practice law in the US.