ABSTRACT
In a legal theory of and for the postnational era, the unity and autonomy of a particular instance of law must be recapitulated against the background of the plurality in which it partakes. Postnational plurality, which often enough amounts to a pluralism of overlapping and ‘rival’ legal regimes and which should be conceived of in terms of interlegality rather than exclusive solipsism, constitutes the context in which the internal unity of instances of law should be examined. Legal diversity has increasingly taken the guise of legal pluralism. The other party to the debate on post-national legal pluralism, dialogical pluralists, points to doctrinal, institutional and procedural devices which have been developed to prevent and to defuse inter-regime conflicts of authority, especially in Europe. The possibility of a conflict transcending a mere border skirmish always looms over a pluralist constellation, and the perspectival approaches of the contending authorities always imply the possibility that the conflict turns out to be legally intractable.
