ABSTRACT
This chapter explores whether it is time to make a pact with the devil. The debate on legal pluralism is characterised by a paradox: on the one hand, as the reaction to Williams’ (2008) lecture and subsequent headlines like ‘Sharia courts “as consensual as rape”, House of Lords told’ shows, 1 legal pluralism is considered abhorrent within the political and media debate; yet, on the other hand, socio-legal scholars have come to regard legal pluralism as ‘an accepted fact of life’ (Griffiths, 2013: 269). This ‘fact’ of legal pluralism is embraced by both post-modernist thinkers who ‘love’ its ‘ambivalent, double-faced character’ (Teubner, 1991: 1443) and legal theorists more cynical about the excesses of post-modernity theory who nevertheless profess that legal pluralism now provides the ‘most convincing and workable theory of law’ that best ‘captures the nature of law in the contemporary era’ (Douglas-Scott, 2013: 23). The contributions to this volume underline this conclusion, underscoring that ‘it is normal for more than one “legal” system to co-exist in the same social arena’ (Tamanaha, 2001: 171). However, given the normality of legal pluralism, it may be questioned what can be gained by invoking the term either descriptively or normatively. How can the concept of legal pluralism advance the debate if it asserts so very little, if it amounts to nothing more than Shachar’s (2001) concept of ‘joint governance’?
