The present role of equity in Ethiopian civil law

In this paper, we shall not use the term “equity” in the technical sense it bears in the common law countries, where for historical reasons peculiar to England “equity” has come to denote a special body of rules for which there is no equivalent in Ethiopia. We give “equity” the straightforward meaning of a justice that is “natural”, that is, results from a conscientious judge's discretionary appreciation of what is fair in the circumstances of a case. Since appreciations of what is “fair” vary with the man on the bench, a necessary corollary of equity is incertitude of result.