We have rediscovered the social diversity of law. From now on, legal pluralism becomes a paradigm to win over our preconceptions and ideologies of law, a fact to be constructed on the basis of a multidisciplinary theorization.

Legal pluralism is a contemporary image of law that has been advanced by sociolegal scholars in response to the dominant monist image of law as derivative of the political state and its progeny. The pluralistic image redirects law and society research toward the myriad normative orders outside the circle of “the Law.” This essay considers the epistemological foundations of both legal pluralism and the legal monist image of law against which its proponents are reacting. It argues that contemporary pluralistic imaginations rest on the same impoverished view of law and its subjects that sustains the traditional claim that law comprises only the processes and institutions emanating from the modern political state. The authors propose an alternative image of law in an effort to redirect the sociolegal studies research agenda.

Challenging the traditional social-scientific legal pluralism of reified cultures and communities, the idea of critical legal pluralism presented in this essay rests on the insight that it is knowledge that maintains and creates realities: a critical legal pluralism imagines legal subjects as “law inventing” and not merely “law abiding.” The authors argue that, once the constructive, creative capacities of legal subjects are recognized alongside the plurality of these same subjects, the relationship between laws and selves reveals its complexity. They acknowledge that their approach is only one of many possible critical legal pluralist approaches; but they maintain that any reconception of law within a framework of critical legal pluralism is a form of emancipatory prescription. As definitions of law are revised and rejected, new vistas are opened for sociolegal scholarship.

Proposals for the demise of the notion of “legal pluralism” in sociolegal and legal anthropological studies have been put to the fore recently by various authors. In their view, the use of the notion carries connotations that basically misrepresent the constitutive dynamics of legal experience, up to the point of impeding the advancement of scientific understanding of law-in-society at present.

The concept of community has a new importance for legal theory and legal sociology. It allows an escape from traditional conceptions of the relationship between law, state and political society. It makes possible the development of a pluralistic view of law that realistically recognises powerful globalising and localising pressures shaping contemporary law. Community is best thought of initially in terms of four ideal types of collective involvement, derived from Weber's types of social action. These imply different kinds of trusting relationships and different regulatory needs. A sense of attachment and a degree of stability in relationships is also necessary to community. Actual groups combine relationships of community in many different ways. Law's contemporary task is to express and coordinate the regulatory needs surrounding structures of community within and beyond the nation state.

From the perspective of the systems theory, Gunther Teubner provides a meaningful contribution to the theory of legal pluralism. Borrowing from Max Weber's idea of a polytheism of values, Teubner shows the relevance for contemporary society of the Weberian metaphor of the struggle of the gods, although shifting the analysis towards the properly sociological ground of a plurality of discourses and systemic rationalities. This reconstruction of the theory of legal pluralism in the wider context of a fragmentation of autonomous spheres of rationality enables Teubner to avoid some of the obstacles which often affect the pluralist view of law, such as a monolithical representation of State law and the absence of a clear notion of what is distinctively legal.

Cultural studies provides an interesting conceptual perspective on legal pluralism for a number of reasons. Rather than asking ontological questions about parallel legal systems, cultural studies frameworks encourage questions about the meanings which might be generated for “law” at the plural sites of intersection of regulatory phenomena: legal meanings must defer to questions about how a subject is positioned, subjected. Narratives of culture, broadly conceived, also allow us to notice the diverse, fluid and often contradictory patterns of regulation and discipline created when there are politically powerful beliefs in the singularity of order and certainty. The efforts in Anglophone cultures to create an “English” heritage safe from various threatening others is echoed in jurisprudential specifications of the criteria of legality.

The implemention of a liberal normative system during the XIXth century was a phenomenon whose complexity we are still grappling with today. Concretely, for societies undergoing deep political and economical mutations this implies a capacity to adapt laws to meet the new imperatives of democracy and the market economy, the two central forces that effect the mode of regulation employed throughout Western societies. The difficulties of implementing a legal system and the development of legal institutions are compounded by the historical weight of this process. The freedom of association which is at the heart of the liberal regime brings to light a potential contradiction between the rights of individuals and of collectivities. The author exposes the evolution of this contradiction and its implications.

The following article attempts to summarize the results of a study of Canadian criminal case law materials relating to aboriginals accused over the last hundred years. The goal of this analysis was to ascertain the openness of Canadian state law to certain forms of legal pluralism. The concept of “dialogism» was used to measure the intensity of recognition or application by a central legal order (Canadian criminal law) of values and norms pertaining to another legal order (legal concepts of aboriginal peoples). Analysis of the case law shows Canadian criminal law slowly evolving towards a weak form of legal pluralism. Early decisions by the courts denote an absence of cultural dialogue, with the exception of those of the circuit court in the Northwest Territories. The more recent case law indicates that if courts are reluctant to recognize the relevance of aboriginal values in the matter of jury selection, trial location and criminal liability, they are more and more receptive to legal pluralism on sentencing issues, where a form of power-sharing is possible between judges and native communities.

The author seeks to make sense of the political and ethical cleavages associated with inner city gentrification in Vancouver, by an examination of the differing perspectives on real property deployed by the opposing constituencies. He identifies a marked division between dominant and community-based readings of property as an economic, political and legal category, associated with opposed visions of space, place and history. Conclusions are drawn relating to the significance of a geographically informed theorisation of decentred legalities, and the complex politics of power, resistance and domination.

Globalization is not simply a matter of transnational trade, and of the state, non-state and supra-state legal regimes which facilitate, regulate or resist it; it also involves transnational social, cultural, intellectual and ideological forces. These forces play upon strategically located knowledge-based elites which play an important role in restructuring the legal fields by which public and public and private institutions are constituted. Canada's experience of globalization—unique because of proximity to the United States—has been both exemplified and, in part, shaped by the fate of its knowledge-based elites, including the business community (especially that part of it involved directly or indirectly with transnational corporations), academics and intellectuals, lawyers, artists and other cultural figures, and individuals involved in politics and public administration. Because of the effects of this “globalization of the mind” upon the institutions which all of these elites inhabit, state and non-state legal fields associated with them have been transformed.

The problem of universalism and relativism in human rights needs to be considered through ethnographic examinations of the mobilization of global human rights in local political struggles. Using the example of a local movement against gender violence in the United States, this article argues that the rights approach provides important resources for local movements but contains particular Western concepts and categories of subjectivity. Given the extent to which legal strategies are subverted within and outside the legal system, here the rights strategy creates new cultural spaces far more than it produces coercive intervention. A framework of legal pluralism and local mobilization provides a perspective which moves beyond the dichotomies of the universalism/relativism debate.