Acting Like an Owner: Land Claims and Judicial Practices in Twentieth-Century Ghana
本文利用加纳土地转让纠纷的法庭记录，探讨土地产权转移如何影响社会关系与土地治理，发现法院常通过补充近期土地利用证据来维持习惯法所有权，从而从土地使用推断所有权，颠覆了标准经济学论点。
Abstract Using court records of legal disputes over transfers of land, this article explores the way transfers of landed property have impacted social relationships and the governance of land rights in Ghana in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As urbanization, commercial agriculture, and natural resource extraction pushed up the value of land, disputes over land ownership have multiplied. In adjudicating such disputes, courts are often confronted with claims based on unverifiable oral histories invoking events of the distant past. Rather than simply dismiss such forms of evidence as hearsay, judges have often supplemented them with documentary and/or oral evidence on recent histories of land use. By doing so, they have tended to sustain customary forms of ownership, effectively recognizing the authority of landholding collectivities such as families and stools alongside that of individual owners. In effect, they are inferring ownership from land use, inverting the standard economic argument.