Transcript a Critical Legal Pluralism

LEGAL PLURALISM
Introduction
What is Legal Pluralism?
Monist Law
Legal Pluralism
From Kleinhans & Macdonald, What is a Critical Legal Pluralism?
Monist View of Law
“Law is only about those forms, processes and institutions
of normative ordering that find their origins and
legitimacy in the political State and its emanations”
Law as explicit creation of human agency
Law has an unlimited capacity to reorder social life
Interpreted and applied
Kleinhans & Macdonald, What is a Critical Legal Pluralism
Pluralistic View of Law
“Law is the most organized, comprehensive, institutionalized and sophisticated agency
of social control”
Kleinhans & Macdonald, What is a Critical Legal Pluralism
Pluralistic View of Law
Montesquieu
Whether
Glacé
Brûlant
Temperé
Quality of
the Land
Human
Reason
Degree of
freedom that
the
constitution
can suffer
Montesquieu, De L’Esprit des lois, I
Location and
size
Economic
activity of
peoples
Pluralistic View of Law
Roman Law
Ius Civile
Ius Gentium
From Kleinhans & Mcdonald, What is a Critical Legal Pluralism?
Spectrum
Kleinhans
& Mcdoland
Jutras
Santos
THE LEGAL DIMENSIONS
OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Daniel Jutras
Jutras
Understanding informal normativity helps us to
understand State Law
picture
• Share
Logic
Law
Everyday
Life
• Interact
Law and everyday life share logic

Norms exist in “microsystems”.
– Order behaviour
– Set boundaries, create expectations
– Help us cooperate
– Express, but also mediate, power differentials
– Susceptible to expiry, reform, change

“Microsystems” and formal law exist on a continuum.
Law and everyday life interact
Law takes from our understandings of
everyday justice

Law depends on societal normativety and
implicit understandings to function

– Ex. Formal contracts usually contain only a small
part of the total agreed practices between parties
Critiques to Jutras



Have we actually learned much?
Fitting the pieces together gets messy.
What about the differences?
Formal law doesn't use trial and error
Formal law tries to be very explicit
Formal law is backed by state coercion
Different phenomena sometimes share
similar logic.
 Academic imperialism: bad social science.

DROIT: UNE CARTE DE LA
LECTURE DÉFORMÉ POUR UNE
CONCEPTION
POST-MODERNE DU DROIT
Boaventura de Sousa Santos
3 Metamorphoses of Law
Nietzsche
Santos
Child
Camel
Lion
Camel
Lion
Child
Camelisation of Law
Question
Truth is there, but what
happened to the
reality?
Cartography as the lens
(3 mechanisms)
1) Scale
2) Projection
3) Symbolization
Scale: a labour example
Local/Large-scale
National/Medium-scale
World/Small-scale


The legal orders act on the same social terrain
“Ainsi, les différents ordres juridiques qui agissent à
différentes échelles transforment les mêmes objets
sociaux en des objets juridiques différents” (p/
391)
Projection



Center and periphery
Ego-centric vs. geocentric law
Projection is NOT a neutral act
 “Le
capital juridique d’un ordre juridique donné n’est
pas également distribué dans l’espace juridique de ce
même ordre” (p/ 395)
Projection example
What is at the center? Contracts at the center of law
•
•
•
•
refugees
asylum seekers
illegal immigrants
stateless peoples
• Mediation
• Truth and
reconciliation
• Restorative justice
Contracts
• Social?
• Private?
• Indigenous peoples
Other examples?

Egocentric law:
 Example:
Lebanon
 Law based on personal characteristics: religion,
ethnicity, community group, caste, gender

Geocentric law:
 Weber:
law of a territory
 Gives rise to legal centrism/state-centric law
Santos:
 “La question de l’interaction historique des deux
légalités, géocentrique et égocentrique, ne peut pas
trancher irrévocablement en faveur de la légalité
géocentrique. Certaines évolutions juridiques
actuelles semblent prouver l’émergence de
particularismes juridiques nouveaux”
 (p/
397)
Symbolization
1)
Homeric Style of Law= Contracts, Disputes
=Instrumental Legality
2) Biblical Style of Law= The idea of
multilayeredness
Critiques
*** Legal Pluralism & Democracy?
*** Legal Pluralism & Practicality?
***Legal Pluralism & Power?
***Legal Pluralism & Chameleonism?
***Legal Pluralism & Colonialism?
WHAT IS A CRITICAL
LEGAL PLURALISM
Kleinhans and Macdonald
Kleinhans and Macdonald
What is a Critical Legal Pluralism
“Contemporary pluralistic imaginations rest on the same
impoverished view of law and its subjects that sustains the
traditional claim that law compromises only the process and
institutions emanating from the modern political state”

A critical legal pluralism imagines legal subjects as
"law inventing" and not merely and "law abiding".
Families
Socio-cultural
Communities
workplaces
State
Law
Commercial
Enterprises
Neighbours
Bureaucratic
Organizations
A Critical Legal Pluralism

Legal subjects are "law inventing" and not merely
"law abiding"
A critical legal pluralism distances itself from
traditional legal pluralist accounts of law in its
rejection of law's positivity.
The Rejection of Law’s Positivity
Families
Socio-cultural
communities
Workplaces
Neighbourhoods
Commercial
Enterprises
Bureaucratic
Organizations
Elevation of the Legal Subject
State
Subject
CRITIQUE TO LEGAL
PLURALISM
Critique to Legal Pluralism
1. Brian Z. Tamanaha General Critic to Legal Pluralism
2. Explanation of Tamanaha’s identified problems and issues
3. Application of the General Critic to “Critical Legal
Pluralism”
Source
Problems
Specific
Issues
Trivialization of Law
Analytical Problems
A Non-Essentialist
Version of Legal
Pluralism
Brian Z. Tamanaha
Non-uniform basis
Instrumental
Problems
Limitations in its
application
1. Analytic Problem
Brian Z. Tamanaha
There is a plurality
of Law in all social
arenas
Danger of the
conclusion :
All forms of
social control are
law
1. Issue: Santos “this very broad
conception of law can easily
lead to the trivialization of law
Not all phenomena
related to law or
law-like has its origin
in the government
2.Analytic Problem
Brian Z. Tamanaha
Concept of Law
2.Issue:
What is
Law?
Plurality of
Legal pluralisms
H.L.A Hart: “Few question concerning
human society have been asked with such
persistence and answered by serious
thinkers in so many diverse, estrange and
paradoxical way”
(Hart, The Concept of Law, 1961)
Instrumental Problems
Brian Z. Tamanaha
No uniformed
concept of Law
Difficulty to
reconceptualise
the law/society
relationship
No careful
delimitation of
social
phenomena
3. Issue: Inability of data gathering and delimited observation for
research
Law originates from
knowledge, as a process
of creating and maintain
myths about reality (p.39)
Critical Legal
Pluralism
In Perspective
What is Law?
Impossibility of
data gathering
for research
A critical legal pluralism
seeks neither a
separation nor an
eventual hierarchical
reconciliation of legal
orders
(p.39)
No clear
delimitation
Diversity of
Legal Pluralisms
Law =/ Social
Phenomena
Sites of
human
interaction
=
Sites of
regulation
Law

Where do we stop speaking of law and find ourselves
simply describing social life? (Tamanaha, Brian, “A nonessentialist version of Legal Pluralism” p.303)