UBU–NTU: being, humanity, and law

Abstract

Part I situates this treatise within the dual tradition from which it draws: the Ubuntu philosophical tradition that runs from the earliest Bantu ontological frameworks through Mbiti, Ramose, Menkiti, and Metz, and the African legal tradition that runs from the customary courts of pre-colonial Uganda through the post-independence constitutional order. It argues that Ubuntu jurisprudence is not an academic novelty but the recovery and systematic elaboration of a tradition that colonial laws up pressed without extinguishing, and that Isaac Christopher Lubogo's Lubogo Framework represents the most advanced systematic attempt yet to translate that tradition into operational legal doctrine.