Population Density, Land Tenure, and Law in the New Guinea Highlands: Reflections on Legal Evolution

Abstract

This paper examines law in the New Guinea Highlands through a cross-cultural, case-study approach. Because of low levels of variation in ecology and infrastructure, the Highlands become a natural laboratory for testing theoretically derived hypotheses relating legal complexity and the evolution of law to population density, agriculture, and property ownership. The predicted variation in legal process fails to emerge and thus the hypotheses are not supported. The uniformity of process will be encouraging to policymakers involved with developing a national legal system based on customary law.