Legal Families Without the Laws: The Fading of Colonial Law in French West Africa

Colonization has created a unique opportunity to test the endurance of legal transplants. Using a sample of seven former French colonies in West Africa, we examine how much of the colonial penal code has been retained by modern countries. This is done using a computer program that matches each article from the colonial code to the article most similar to it in each contemporary code. This novel algorithmic approach allows us to undertake millions of comparisons across the entirety of the penal codes in question. The results reveal large variation in the postcolonial era. While Senegal has retained almost half of the colonial penal code, Togo has kept less than one percent. These quantitative results are validated through a qualitative analysis of nine areas of the law, which shows that the algorithm is able to match articles about as well as a human. We are thus confident that the program is able to accurately measure which articles have changed and which have remained the same since 1955. Despite frequent claims that these legal systems should be grouped together, legislation in these countries seems to have diverged. This form of analysis yields a much more nuanced understanding of how laws change over time, while also challenging the idea that African legal systems are stagnant.