The States of Law in Papua New Guinea

This article employs a consideration of Peter Fitzpatrick’s early work in Papua New Guinea to reflect on legal and social developments in the country since his residence there during the independence period. In particular, Fitzpatrick’s concerns about the emergence of a Papua New Guinean bourgeois legality that would shape the postcolony are shown to have been prescient in some respects, and also to have had other outcomes unanticipated by the Marxist legal and anthropological imagination of the 1970s. Finally, I use examples from the heterogeneous lawscape of Papua New Guinean cities to illustrate how the ‘true people’s law’ envisioned by Fitzpatrick is in the process of emerging in spaces outside of formal legislative or court processes.