ABSTRACT
Legal pluralism is a condition in which laws derived from different regulatory regimes or systems interact or compete normatively in the same social space. Do lawyers need theories to explain the nature of this interaction or competition and how they should take account of it? This chapter argues that in complex legal systems lawyers address issues of legal pluralism routinely in practice but that orthodox juristic methods for doing this are ceasing to be adequate. Legal pluralism has the potential to undermine the orthodoxies of modern juristic thought in two fundamental ways: (i) by destabilising the idea that law has any ‘true’, essential, or timeless nature that philosophy could reveal or lawyers could assume, and (ii) by reviving the idea that legal authority is not revealed by applying positivist pedigree tests of validity but is to be built pragmatically through communication and compromise between normative orders. Juristic thought presently lacks the resources to deal with these emerging challenges. Confronting them demands an alliance between lawyers’ analytical techniques and sociolegal empirical studies of regulatory practices. The chapter claims that a practically oriented theory of legal pluralism – centred on a minimal provisional model of law and an enlarged understanding of types and sources of authority – must inform this alliance.
