The principal phenomenon that will be dealt with in this chapter is legal pluralism. I do not intend to provide a general description of legal pluralism, as there is already an extensive literature dealing with that topic. Instead, I will focus on the issue of whether legal pluralism can contribute to the unity of law. A hypothesis on a pro-systemic effect of legal pluralism can appear somewhat counterintuitive at first sight. Indeed, pluralism is often considered a source of uncertainty for the addressees of law, especially as regards the sources of law and their mutual relationships, as well as the weakening authority of states and their bodies in relation to international or supranational institutions.

The complexity associated with describing legal pluralism is caused, among other things, by the existence of multiple models of what scholars denote as legal pluralism. This is why I consider it necessary to deal with the very conception of legal pluralism in section 4.1 below. From among the two basic models of legal pluralism, I will use as my starting point the narrower conception dealing with the simultaneous effect of two or more independent institutionalised legal systems (i.e. systems of rules relying on public authority) in one and the same territory, affecting persons present in this territory. I shall base my considerations not only on a distinction between legal pluralism and legal centralism, associated with the positivist model of effects of a single legal order, but also on an examination of historical and contemporary forms of legal pluralism.

Pluralism, in both the narrower conception and in the broader sense, which I denote as normative and which includes non-state law and unofficial law, has a certain integrating potential in the law; this, in turn, weakens the widespread argument regarding the destabilisation of contemporary pluralistic law.

4.1. TWO APPROACHES TO LEGAL PLURALISM

In the introduction to this chapter, I mentioned that I would base my considerations on a narrower conception of legal pluralism. I will explain my approach in more detail here. If we want to draw the characteristic of a certain conception of legal pluralism, I believe we have to focus primarily on the very concept of law.