The Legal System in Dominica

March 6 - On Dominica, I lived with Norris and Joan Prevost.

Joan is a practicing attorney in Dominica. Joan and I had many discussions about the legal system in her country.

As with many Eastern Caribbean Islands, Dominica follows the English system which is very similar to the US system, but more formal in my experience. One example of this is that all the attorneys appearing in court must wear robes. Also, any witness must stand the entire time he or she is giving testimony and the defendant must stand in basically a cage the entire trial!

I visited court with Joan and had a chance to speak with one of the Magistrates there and sat in on a criminal trial. We also toured the law library. Joan indicated that the library does not have all the court cases published because the country does not have enough funding to publish all the cases resulting in many laws never getting "on the books" literally. She said it was very frustrating trying to research a specific issue when the library just did not have the resources to assist the attorneys in their search. It made me remember how fortunate American attorneys are in that we have unlimited access to all US and state laws at our finger tips any time of the day thanks to huge legal databases online.

Additionally, Dominica is such a new country that it just does not have many laws or legal precedent. I never thought about the implications of a relatively new country not having a long history of case law or statutes to research and cite to when making arguments in court.

Lillah McBride