What is a Critical Legal Pluralism?

Canadian Journal of Law and Society

Volumn 12, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 25-46

  Kleinhans, Martha Marie ^a   Macdonald, Roderick A ^a  

^a MCGILL UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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EID: 85012507678     PISSN: 08293201     EISSN: 19110227     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0829320100005342     Document Type: Article

References (87)

1. In describing our endeavour as one of imagining a research practice, we take our cue from K. Calavita & C. Seron, “Postmodernism and Protest: Recovering the Sociolegal Imagination“ (1992) 26 Law and Society Rev. 765 at 770: “This is a crucial juncture for sociolegal studies. It is a time of self-reflection and reevaluation. a time of self-criticism and skepticism. about the validity of the endeavour itself.”
2. See e.g. J. Gilissen, “Introduction à l'éftide compaée du pluralisme juridique“ in J. Gilissen, ed. Le Pluralisme juridique (Brussels: Université de Bruxelles, 1971) 7
3. M. B. Hooker, Legal Pluralism: An Introduction to Colonial and Neo-Colonial Laws (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
4. See B. Z. Tamanaha, “The Folly of the ‘Social Scientific’ Conception of Legal Pluralism“ (1993) 20 Journal of Law and Society 192.
5. Compare D. Black, Sociological Jurisprudence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)
6. D. Nelken, “Law in Action or Living Law? Back to the Beginning in Sociology of Law“ (1984) 4 Legal Studies 157.
7. See A. O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
8. C. L. Montesquieu, De I ‘esprit des lois (Paris: Lefevre, 1826) at 128: “La loi, en général, est la raison humaine, en tant qu'elle gouverne tous les peuples de la terre; et les lois politiques et civiles de chaque nation ne doivent etre que des cas particuliers où s'applique cette raison humaine.”
9. The original Italian version was published in 1915 [L'ordinamento giuridico, 2nd ed.]. See, for the French version, G. Santi Romano, L'ordre juridique, 2nd ed. trans. L. Francois & P. Gothot (Paris: Dalloz, 1975).
10. Gurvitch's monograph was first published in French in 1940. G. Gurvitch, Éléments de sociologie juridique (Paris: Aubier, 1940).
11. See, for the English version, G. Gurvitch, The Sociology of Law (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1942).
12. See K. Winston, ed. The Principles of Social Order: Selected Essays of Lon L. Fuller (Durham: Duke University Press, 1983)
13. L. L. Fuller, “The Law's Precarious Hold On Life“ (1969) 3 Georgia L. Rev. 609
14. L. L. Fuller, “Law as a Means of Social Control and Law as a Facilitation of Human Interaction“ [1975] Brigham Young University L. Rev. 89
15. L. L. Fuller, “Some Presuppositions Shaping the Concept of ‘Socialization'“ in J. Tapp & F. Levine, eds. Law, Justice and the Individual in Society (New York: Holt Reinhart & Winston, 1977) 33.
16. J. Griffiths, “What is Legal Pluralism?“ (1986) 24 Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 1. For an early interpretation of social-scientific pluralism—since repudiated by its author—
17. see also J. Vanderlinden, “Le Pluralisme juridique: Essai de synthèse“ in Gilissen, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 2, 19.
18. See e.g. A. Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1955)
19. L. W. Pye, Aspects of Political Development (Boston: Little Brown, 1966)
20. G. R. Woodman, “Some Realism About Customary Law: The West African Experience“ [1969] Wisconsin L. Rev. 128.
21. See e.g. H. V. Ball, G. E. Simpson & K. Ikeda, “A Re-examination of William Graham Sumner“ (1962) 14 Journal of Legal Education 299
22. J. Stone, Social Dimensions of Law and Justice (London: Stevens & Sons, 1966).
23. See e.g. S. F. Moore, “Law and Social Change: The Semi-autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study“ in S. F. Moore, ed. Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) 54
24. J. Auerbach, Justice Without Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983)
25. B. de Sousa Santos, “The Law of the Oppressed: The Construction and Reproduction of Legality in Pasargada“ (1977) 12 Law and Society Rev. 5.
26. See also J. Vanderlinden, “Acadie: à la rencontre de l'histoire du droit avant le dérangement“ (1996) 23 Manitoba Law Journal 146
27. J. Vanderlinden, “La Réception des systèmes juridiques europ6ens au Canada“ (1996) 64 Legal History Rev. 359.
28. See e.g. G. R. Woodman, “Legal Pluralism and Justice“ [1996] 40 Journal of African Law 152 at 157: “Legal pluralism in general may be defined as the state of affairs in which a category of social relations is within the fields of operation of two or more bodies of legal norms. Alternatively, if it is viewed not from above in the process of mapping the legal universe but rather from the perspective of the individual subject of law, legal pluralism may be said to exist whenever a person is subject to more than one body of law.”
29. See also J. Vanderlinden, “Return to Legal Pluralism: Twenty Years Later“ (1989) 28 Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 149
30. J. Vanderlinden, “Vers une nouvelle conception du pluralisme juridique“ (1993) 53 Revue de la recherche juridique 573, in which the author elaborates a modification of his earlier position: “Je modifierais ma definition de 1969 de la manière suivante: le pluralisme juridique est la situation, pour un individu, dans laquelle des mécanismes juridiques relevant d'ordonnancements différents sont susceptibles de s'appliquer à cette situation.” [emphasis in original].
31. On the latter type of State pluralism see, notably, H. W. Arthurs, Without the Law: Administrative Justice and Legal Pluralism in 19th Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985) [hereinafter Without the Law].
32. On this point generally, see L. Brilmayer, Conflict of Laws: Foundations and Future Directions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991) at 1–2: “The fundamental and unavoidable problem of choice of law is one of perspective. What normative perspective should a court adopt in making the choice between the law of one state and the law of another state?. Choice of law theory vacillates erratically between two different answers to this question of proper perspective. One tradition is unabashedly a priori; it locates the source of choice of law rules in some normative system external to and more important than the authority of any particular state. The other, internal tradition avoids the problem of authoritative source by treating the choice of law issue as turning on the forum state's local law.”
33. For a more complete examination of this theme, see R. A. Macdonald, “Les Vieilles Gardes: Hypothèses sur l'émergence des normes, l'internormativité et le désordre à travers une typologie des institutions normatives“ in J.-G. Belley, ed. Le Droit soluble: Contributions québécoises à Vétude de l'internormativité (Paris: L.G.D.J. 1996) 233.
34. This is essentially the point argued by J. P. B. Josselin de Jong, “Customary Law: A Confusing Fiction“ in A. D. Renteln & A. Dundes, Folk Law: Essays in the Theory and Practice of lex non scripta (New York: Garland, 1994) at 111.
35. See also P. Fitzpatrick, “Law, Plurality and Underdevelopment“ in D. Sugarman, ed. Legality, Ideology and the State (London: Academic, 1983) 159 at 175:
36. “Law, as state law, serves to produce some homogeneity in support of the ruling group.”
37. See, generally, S. E. Merry, “Legal Pluralism“ (1988) 22 Law and Society Rev. 869 at 890: “[Legal pluralism]. provides a framework for understanding the dynamics of the imposition of law and of resistance to law. attention to plural orders examines limits to the ideological power of state law.”
38. G. Teubner, “The Two Faces of Janus: Rethinking Legal Pluralism“ (1992) 13 Cardozo L. Rev. 1443 at 1443:
39. “Legal pluralism rediscovers the subversive power of suppressed discourses.”
40. T. Wilhelmsson, “Legal Integration as Disintegration of National Law“ in H. Petersen & H. Zahle, eds. Legal Polycentricity: Consequences of Pluralism in Law (Aldershot, England: Dartmouth, 1995) at 128: “[T]he paradigmatic concept of law is still the (one and only) law of the national state” [emphasis in original].
41. This, of course, is simply an instantiation of a point made forcefully by Ludwig Wittgenstein. See L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958) s. 115: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”
42. For explorations of how law constitutes subjectivity, see generally P. Schlag et al. “Postmodernism and Law: A Symposium“ (1991) 62 Colorado L. Rev. 439.
43. See also J. Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority'“ (1990) 11 Cardozo L. Rev. 919
44. C. Douzinas & R. Warrington, “The Face of Justice: A Jurisprudence of Alterity“ (1994) 3 Social and Legal Studies 405
45. A. Sarat, “A Prophecy of Possibility: Metaphorical Exploration of Postmodern Legal Subjectivity“ (1995) 29 Law and Society Rev. 615.
46. L. Pospisil, Anthropology of Law: Comparative Theory (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
47. M. G. Smith, Corporations and Society (London: Duckworth, 1974).
48. E. Ehrlich, Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law, trans. W. Moll (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936).
49. See D. Manderson, “Beyond the Provincial: Space, Aesthetics, and Modernist Legal Theory“ (1996) 20 Melbourne University L. Rev. 1048.
50. This is most explicit in writings of progressive legal pluralists such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos. See, for example, B. de Sousa Santos, “On Modes of Production of Law and Social Power“ (1985) 13 International Journal of the Sociology of Law 299.
51. D. Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995) at 40–42.
52. A critical view must surely reject the rationalist world view which “constantly asks for the redemption and justification of all descriptive and normative claims and that privileges the individual rationalist self and its ability to make normative recommendations about the law's ideal structure through ego-centered reason.” See P. Schlag, “Missing Pieces: A Cognitive Approach to Law“ (1989) 67 Texas L. Rev. 1195 at 1208.
53. B. van Roermund, “Law is Narrative, not Literature“ (1994) 23 Dutch Journal for Legal Philosophy and Legal Theory 221.
54. See G. R. Woodman, “Ideological Conflict and Social Observation: Recent Debate About Legal Pluralism“ (1998) 40 Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law [forthcoming]
55. See S. E. Merry, “Anthropology, Law, and Transitional Processes“ (1992) 21 Annual Review of Anthropology 357 at 358, and
56. B. de Sousa Santos, “Law: A Map of Misreading. Toward a Postmodern Conception of Law“ (1987) 14 Journal of Law and Society 279 at 298. In an attempt to provide a postmodern reconception of law, de Sousa Santos argues that legal pluralism plays a critical role. Here, however, the legal pluralism to which he appeals is not the traditional version of legal anthropologists “in which legal orders are conceived as separate entities coexisting in the same political space, but rather the conception of different legal spaces superimposed, interpenetrated, and mixed in our minds as much as in our actions, in occasions of qualitative leaps or sweeping crises in our life trajectories as well as in the dull routine of eventless everyday life” [emphasis added].
57. See the discussion in B. Z. Tamanaha, “An Analytical Map of Social Scientific Approaches to the Concept of Law“ (1995) 15 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 501 [hereinafter “Social Scientific Approaches”].
58. There exist many ways of conceiving of “critical legal pluralism” in the legal imagination. Although the image presented here has been inspired by hermeneutic and narrative analyses, the intent has not been to restrict the scope of the proposed agenda. The necessary conditions of a critical legal pluralism, as outlined in the following paragraphs, are broad enough to encompass numerous images of law, of which ours is but an example. The use of the indefinite article “a” in the title of this essay is meant to signal the diverse possibilities with the frame of critical legal pluralism. Alternative and contrasting conceptions of a critical legal pluralism are present in the authors’ own previous work. See e.g. “The Creative Self', Oxford Journal of Legal Studies ∗;
59. See e.g. “', Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.
60. “A Hermeneutic Turn Through Narrative“, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies ∗;
61. “Multiple Selves and Legal Pluralism,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies ∗;
62. “Critical Legal Pluralism,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies ∗.
63. Of course, because subjects and communities are in a constructing/constructed relationship, a critical legal pluralism could even define “community” as a process of knowledge construction and, thus, capture the relational nature of community within the subject. See A. Maclntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) at 220: “I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point.”
64. See also J. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) at 67: “It can never be the case that there is a ‘self independent of one's cultural-historical existence.”
65. B. de Sousa Santos, “Three Metaphors for a New Conception of Law: The Frontier, the Baroque, and the South“ (1995) 29 Law and Society Rev. 569 at 573.
66. On the points raised in the next few paragraphs see, generally, S. C. McGuire, “Critical Legal Pluralism: A Thought-Piece on a Direction for Socio-legal Studies“ (Doctoral dissertation, Faculty of Law, McGill University, 1996) [unpublished].
67. These assumptions animate a conception of law as i) a positive phenomenon, ii) centrally defined, even if implicitly, by appeal to the model of state law and, iii) monistic within each of the orders comprising its quantitative plurality. Even more recent social scientific theories such as autopoiesis, for example, rest on the positivity of the characteristic binary distinctions of law: lawful/unlawful; legal/illegal. See M. King, “The Truth About Autopoiesis“ (1993) 20 Journal of Law and Society 218.
68. For a critique of autopoiesis along these lines, see “Social Scientific Approaches“, Journal of Law and Society 42.
69. Santi Romano, Journal of Law and Society 6 at 82–83. “En effet, si l'on peut parfaitement concevoi le droit sans l'État, il est impossible de définir l'état sans recourir au concept de droit.”
70. See R. A. Macdonald, “Vers la reconnaissance d'une normativité implicite et inférentielle“ (1985) 18 Sociologie et Sociétés 38.
71. For a similar argument made with regards to contemporary debates about modern constitutionalism and cultural diversity, see J. Tully, Strange Multiplicity Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995) at 58ff.
72. L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. D. Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe (London: Basi Blackwell, 1969) at para. 84ff.
73. One could also argue that, notwithstanding the discursive source of this concept of “law” in European political systems, even there it has transcended the boundaries imposed upon it by its original construction. It is just this local transcendence that makes the present inquiry possible. See e.g. the discussion in L. L. Fuller, “Human Interaction and the Law“ in Winston, On Certainty 8, 211.
74. In fact, it might be argued that Teubner's proposed solution to the deconstructive dilemma of postmodern approaches highlights the need to find agency in discussions of legal pluralism. Teubner calls attention to the lack of reconstructive practice in postmodern jurisprudence, and suggests that autopoiesis might be the answer. His solution, however, succeeds only in anthropomorphizing and subjectifying the normative orders. The realm of his inquiry remains the normative orders as phenomena, albeit “living” phenomena. See Teubner, On Certainty 24.
75. “Social Scientific Approaches“, On Certainty 42.
76. C. Geertz, Local Knowledge (New York: Basic, 1983) at 232.
77. dative, accusative, ablative, vocative and locative. In Cree there are about a dozen and one-half. Each case might be said to key to a self: subject, belonger, receiver, object, exponent, self-assessor, and locator. Similarly, selves might be conceived as being formed and/or understood through narrative. Within such a narrative approach acts of self-narration, or the autobiographical ruminations that concerr the critical legal pluralist, leave the realm of mere description, and become fundamental to the emergence and reality of subjects themselves. See, further, A. P. Kerby, Narrative and the Self (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991)
78. H. Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
79. See C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
80. J. McDowell, “Virtue and Reason“ (1979) 62 The Monist 331 at 339.
81. J. Starr & J. F. Collier, “Historical Studies of Legal Change“ (1987) 28 Current Anthropology 367.
82. D. Cornell, “Law and the Postmodern Mind: Rethinking the Beyond of the Real“ (1995) 16 Cardozo L. Rev. 729.
83. For a discussion of an analogous situation in the differing approaches to theater (the linear/transgression model of the Theatre of the Oppressed and the circular model of certain aboriginal groups adopting methods used in “healing circles”), see C. Graham, “On the Seductiveness of Clarity and the Pain of Erasure“ (Paper presented to the Association for Canadian Theatre Research Annual Conference, 1992) [unpublished].
84. G. Bachelard, La Poétique de I'espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958) c. 10.
85. The circular image is not intended to conjure the empty sphere of geometricians, rather it embodies the full sphere of being. See G. Bachelard, La Poétique de I'espace 64 at 244
86. K. Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit (Munich: R. Piper, 1947) at 50: “Jedes Dasein Scheint in sich rund” (Every being seems in itself round).
87. See J.-G. Belley, “Le Pluralisme juridique chez Roderick Macdonald: Une Analyse séquentielle“ in Lajoie, ed. Von der Wahrheit ∗ [forthcoming].