ABSTRACT
In practice the claims of legal modernity do not fully work and official state law has limits, a situation which feeds legal pluralism. Thus, social engineering through law is not a simple but rather a highly contentious matter. Despite the claims of legal modernity, socio-legal studies have repeatedly discovered that there are alternative normative orderings in society and that resistance to official law is always an issue at stake. As one writer comments, 'the "reach" of state power and state law is subject to specific conditions and always falls short of its ideological pretensions' (Hunt 1992b: 59).
