| Thomas Hobbes argues that in the absence of government, persons would not cooperate voluntarily to provide themselves with public goods. He was specifically concerned that would be the case when it comes to order, i.e., security and domestic peace. To him, this concern justifies the state, thereby interlinking it with the administration of law. Hobbes's view has been challenged by legal pluralists, multiculturalists, libertarians and utilitarian legal scholars. These schools of thought suggest the state should not have a monopoly over coercive social control. Over the last three decades, a school of thought comprised of libertarian and utilitarian thinkers has advocated taking a step further by fully separating state and law. The privatization of law model revives the old debate around the theoretical philosophical construct of the "state of nature": what happens when law is not centralized in the hands of the political authority? Privatization of law scholars suggest that, in the context of "market communities," cooperation can prevail.;These have been theoretical debates, but the Buduburam refugee camp provides us with an almost natural experiment in the "state of nature". The camp is within Ghana's national territory, yet the state excludes the camp from its legal system and refuses to administer law within it. The existence of a state and the absence of a state-run legal system make the camp a suitable test case for the privatization of law model. It offers an opportunity to explore the plausibility of private ordering in the context of a market community.;This project questions the assumption that law can be administered privately, through market communities. First, it challenges the literature that purports to have discovered communities that had developed private ordering from below. For this purpose the project organizes the patchwork of empirical data gathered by different disciplines about extra-legal orders into a cohesive taxonomy of the conditions documented to foster private legal ordering from below. I contend that the extra-legal orders depicted in the private ordering literature had developed in the context of hierarchical, rather than market communities. Weaker parties, who depended on community leaders for employment and social gratifications, were coerced to use extra-legal dispute processing which, in turn, reinforced intra-group hierarchies and dependence. My point here is that private orders have not yet been shown to emerge in market communities. Secondly, the project reports on my findings from Buduburam, which explore the consequences of dispersing law to a population resembling a market community, and provide yet another refutation of the celebratory view of spontaneous private ordering. In Buduburam, legal privatization from above of a non-hierarchical, unorganized population led to "private disorder." The conclusion, based on my findings from Buduburam and on a critical analysis of the existing empirical literature about private ordering, is that market communities are not a suitable social context for private ordering. |
