Legal Dissonance

Papua New Guinea’s two most powerful legal orders — customary law and state law —undermine the other in criminal matters. This phenomenon, called legal dissonance, can help explain the low level of personal security found in many parts of the country. It is shown that a lack of coordination in the punishing of wrong behavior is both problematic for legal orders themselves and for those who are subject to such a legal phenomenon. Legal dissonance can lead to an activity being simultaneously advanced by one legal order and punished by the other, leading to injustice, and, perhaps more importantly, an undermining of each legal order’s ability to deter wrongdoing.