Foreword to the Second Edition

• Pages: 19-20
• Author: Professor Keith Patchett

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

This new edition of Professor Rose-Marie Belle Antoine’s excellent Commonwealth

Caribbean Law and Legal Systems is to be warmly welcomed. By a happy coincidence its

publication comes exactly 50 years after the first focused research into the law in the

Commonwealth Caribbean was initiated by Sir Roy Marshall, at the time Dean of the

Faculty of Law at the University of Sheffield. Until that time, the origins and charac-

teristics of the region’s legal institutions had been the subject of almost no systematic

study. The legal education and training of the relatively few WestIndian practitioners

was provided through studying for the English Bar and Law Society, in some cases

after obtaining a law degree at an English University. Hardly surprisingly, law and

practice in the Caribbean countries, all of which were still colonial possessions, drew

heavily upon English law and practice, not uncommonly of an earlier date.

That the region had a distinct legal history that merited examination and distinct-

ive social needs that were not met through the largely inherited law became apparent

through such early doctoral researches as those of Nick Liverpool (on succession in

the West Indies), Edwin Watkins (on the Jamaican legal system), Fenton Ramsahoye

(British Guiana land law) and Adolph Edwards (Jamaican criminal law). Those

themes were explored at a series of ground-breaking colloquia at Cambridge and

Cumberland Lodge, in Windsor Great Park, attended by West Indian students study-

ing in England (see my accounts in Some aspects of Marriage and Divorce in the West

Indies (1959) 8 ICLQ 632-677 and Law in the West Indies, Some Recent Trends, British

Institute of International and Comparative Law, 1966).

However, it was the establishment of the Faculty of Law in the University of the

West Indies in 1970 and the need to provide materials for the legal education of the

region’s lawyers that created the opportunity for sustained legal research concerning

the Commonwealth Caribbean. Acceptance by past and present members of the

Faculty of that opportunity has resulted in a scholarly output that addresses an

evident concern to develop law and legal institutions that effectively serve the

region’s specific needs and circumstances. This book is a fine example of this scholarly

development, which Professor Antoine has already confidently demonstrated in her

published work relating to the law of Offshore Finance in the Caribbean.

Readers of this work will find not only a careful and up-to-date account of the

legal systems and the sources of law in the region but also a thoughtful and pertinent

analysis of the challenges that face a system that is necessarily moving away from its

derivative origins. It is refreshing to see the extent to which it has been possible for the

author to illustrate so many aspects of the subject matter with locally decided cases,

many of which bear testimony to a growing confidence of the judiciary to develop the

law to take account of local circumstances. It is also valuable to be provided with a

discussion of the issues facing the newly operational Caribbean Court of Justice and

of the past role and likely future implications of the judgments of the Judicial Com-

mittee of the Privy Council, particularly those often controversial decisions relating to

the death penalty that have dominated its Caribbean case load.

This work marks the considerable progress that has been made in creating law

and legal institutions that are appropriate to the needs of the communities of the

Commonwealth Caribbean, but it also offers insights as to where further develop-

ment is called for. Those who study those institutions need a well organised and well

written publication from which to acquire reliable information about their origins,