Open Lectures

Lecture notes, free to every student.

Naomi Eglantine Christie · LL.B. (Distinction) · L.E.C. (Honours) · LL.M., New York University, 2015 — International Legal Studies · Attorney-at-Law, admitted to the Bar of Guyana, October 2013, and to the Bar of Grenada, 2014.

These notes are written for students of law in Guyana and the wider Caribbean — at the University of Guyana, the Hugh Wooding, Norman Manley and Eugene Dupuch law schools, and in the CAPE and CSEC classrooms that feed them. Each lecture states the law from its primary sources, footnotes them, and ends with a reading list and questions for discussion. They may be printed, copied and used in teaching with attribution.

New lectures are added as they are written. Students who find an error, or who want a topic covered, may write to naomi@christiejustuslaw.com.

Open Lecture 1

Sources of Law in Guyana and Legal Method

The Constitution, the statute book, the received common law, the courts, and how to read all four

What you will learn. This lecture maps the sources of law in Guyana in the order a court ranks them: the Constitution as supreme law and how it is altered; Acts of Parliament and subsidiary legislation under the Interpretation and General Clauses Act; the reception of the English common law and equity on 1 January 1917 and the Roman-Dutch rules that survived it, the reason land law still speaks of immovable property and transports; the hierarchy of courts from the magistrate to the Caribbean Court of Justice, and how Privy Council appeals ended in 1970; the doctrine of precedent as the Caribbean Court of Justice has stated it; international law and the treaties in the Fourth Schedule; and the statutory recognition of Amerindian collective rights. It closes with method: how to read a statute, how to read a case, how to cite, and a worked example using McEwan v Attorney General of Guyana.

September 2026 · 12 pages · 65 footnotes

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Open Lecture 2

Introduction to Public International Law for Caribbean Students

States, sources, treaties, courts and the small state, read from Guyana

What you will learn. This lecture introduces public international law from where a Caribbean student stands: a small state that cannot enforce anything against its neighbour and therefore uses the law as infrastructure. It covers the subjects of the system and how Guyana became one of them on 26 May 1966; the sources listed in Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice and the standards that article does not list but that Guyana obeys; how a treaty is read, using the Geneva Agreement of 1966 and the Court's reading of its Article IV; how international law enters Guyanese law through a dualist constitution, articles 39(2) and 154A and the statute book; the settlement of disputes without power, through the four decisions the Court has so far given in Arbitral Award of 3 October 1899 (Guyana v Venezuela); the law on the use of force and the conduct of hostilities in outline; and method: how to read a judgment, a treaty and a resolution, how to cite them, and how to describe a pending case without predicting it.

September 2026 · 14 pages · 72 footnotes

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See also the research papers at Research, the free CAPE and CSEC study guides at littlerockgy.com/study-guides, and the open legal research library at The Christie Justus Law Library.