ABSTRACT
Legal pluralism provided a useful alternative framework because pluralism had always sought to identify hybrid legal spaces, where multiple normative systems occupied the same social field. An emphasis on legal pluralism also freed scholars from endless intractable debates about whether international law is truly law given that coercive enforcement power in the international and transnational arena is often indirect or non-existent. Moreover, global legal pluralism recognizes the possibility that at least sometimes this pluralism of normative authority may be preferable to a system that imposes a single authority because the reality of legal pluralism empowers individuals to strategically operate among normative and procedural regimes. Sovereigntists think global legal pluralism pays insufficient attention to nation-state prerogatives and just universalism in another guise. The move to global legal pluralism allows more detailed analysis of all the ways in which international and transnational legal and quasi-legal pronouncements have potential impact regardless of whether the pronouncements are accompanied by the threat of coercive force.
