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What is a Critical Legal Pluralism?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2014

Martha-Marie Kleinhans  and
Roderick A. Macdonald
Martha-Marie Kleinhans
Affiliation:
Faculty of Law, McGill University
Roderick A. Macdonald
Affiliation:
Faculty of Law, McGill University
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Abstract

Legal pluralism is a contemporary image of law that has been advanced by sociolegal scholars in response to the dominant monist image of law as derivative of the political state and its progeny. The pluralistic image redirects law and society research toward the myriad normative orders outside the circle of “the Law.” This essay considers the epistemological foundations of both legal pluralism and the legal monist image of law against which its proponents are reacting. It argues that contemporary pluralistic imaginations rest on the same impoverished view of law and its subjects that sustains the traditional claim that law comprises only the processes and institutions emanating from the modern political state. The authors propose an alternative image of law in an effort to redirect the sociolegal studies research agenda.

Challenging the traditional social-scientific legal pluralism of reified cultures and communities, the idea of critical legal pluralism presented in this essay rests on the insight that it is knowledge that maintains and creates realities: a critical legal pluralism imagines legal subjects as “law inventing” and not merely “law abiding.” The authors argue that, once the constructive, creative capacities of legal subjects are recognized alongside the plurality of these same subjects, the relationship between laws and selves reveals its complexity. They acknowledge that their approach is only one of many possible critical legal pluralist approaches; but they maintain that any reconception of law within a framework of critical legal pluralism is a form of emancipatory prescription. As definitions of law are revised and rejected, new vistas are opened for sociolegal scholarship.

Résumé

Le pluralisme juridique est une image contemporaine du droit mise de l'avant par les sociologues afin de répondre à la dominante image monolithique du droit dérivée de l'État politique et de sa progéniture. Cette image pluraliste réoriente les recherches en droit et société vers une série d'ordres normatifs situés à l'extérieur du cercle du «Droit». Le présent article examine les fondements épistémologiques du pluralisme juridique et de l'image monolithique du droit auxquels les pluralistes s'opposent. Les auteurs soutiennent que les images des pluralistes contemporains reposent sur une vision traditionnelle et appauvrie du droit et de ses sujets. Cette même vision sert de base aux revendications de ceux et celles qui croient que le droit ne comprend que les processus et les institutions provenant de l'État politique moderne. Les auteurs proposent une nouvelle image du droit en vue de réorienter les recherches sociojuridiques.

Remettant en question le concept traditionnel et socio-scientifique du pluralisme juridique des cultures et communautés «réifiées», le «pluralisme juridique critique», présenté dans cet article, repose sur l'idée voulant que le savoir est l'élément qui maintient et crée les réalités : un «pluralisme juridique critique» offre un portrait des sujets légaux en tant que sujets créatifs» du droit et non en tant que simples «sujets assujettis» du droit. Une fois admises parallèlement à la pluralité de ces mêmes sujets, les capactés constructives et créatives des sujets légaux révèlent la complexité de la relation entre le droit et le soi. Les auteurs reconnaissent que l'image du droit qu'ils avancent ne représente qu'une approche d'un «pluralisme juridique critique» parmi plusieurs. Ils maintiennent par contre que toute image émanant du cadre du «pluralisme juridique critique» se veut émancipatoirement normative. La redéfinition et le rejet des images du droit serviraient à peindre un nouveau paysage aux études sociojuridiques.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 12 , Issue 02: Le Pluralisme juridique/Legal Pluralism , Fall/automne 1997 , pp. 25 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 1997

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References

1. In describing our endeavour as one of imagining a research practice, we take our cue from Calavita, K. & Seron, C., “Postmodernism and Protest: Recovering the Sociolegal Imagination” (1992) 26 Law and Society Rev. 765 at 770CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “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.”

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15. On the latter type of State pluralism see, notably, Arthurs, H. W., Without the Law: Administrative Justice and Legal Pluralism in 19th Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985)Google Scholar [hereinafter Without the Law].

16. On this point generally, see Brilmayer, L., Conflict of Laws: Foundations and Future Directions (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991) at 1–2Google Scholar: “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.”

17. For a more complete examination of this theme, see Macdonald, R. A., “Les Vieilles Gardes: Hypothèses sur l'émergence des normes, l'internormativité et le désordre à travers une typologie des institutions normatives” in Belley, J.-G., ed., Le Droit soluble: Contributions québécoises à l'étude de l'internormativité (Paris: L.G.D.J., 1996) 233Google Scholar.

18. This is essentially the point argued by de Jong, J. P. B. Josselin, “Customary Law: A Confusing Fiction” in Renteln, A. D. & Dundes, A., Folk Law: Essays in the Theory and Practice of lex non scripta (New York: Garland, 1994) at 111Google Scholar.

19. See Tamanaha, supra note 3 at 210: “If legal pluralists accepted the standard view of law as state law, they would be free to examine in each case, as separate questions, whether or when or in what ways state law (this legal apparatus) actually is involved in maintaining the normative order of society … The critical potential of this approach is far greater” [footnotes omitted]. In a subsequent communication with the authors, Professor Tamanaha observes that he was not intending to argue the priority of State law, but was rather signaling that social-scientific pluralists themselves implicitly accept this priority.

20. See also Fitzpatrick, P., “Law, Plurality and Underdevelopment” in Sugarman, D., ed., Legality, Ideology and the State (London: Academic, 1983) 159 at 175Google Scholar: “Law, as state law, serves to produce some homogeneity in support of the ruling group.”

21. There is nothing new about the fact that deep conflicts about social meaning—about authenticity, solidarity, freedom, equality, democracy—find their expression in disputes about human symbolic artefacts. What is especially characteristic of struggles for law, however, is how these disputes about meaning have been framed by disputants as matters of definition. Within the legal community, stipulative definitions have long been masqueraded as incontrovertible description in the age-old quest to externalize to the opponent the burden of the qualifying adjective. But these expressions of definitional conflict should be recognized for what they are: rhetorical strategies. One set of protagonists identifies the word law exclusively with the explicit product of the political State, compelling opponents to carry the qualifying adjectives (non-state, informal, soft, customary) when discussing the type of law that interests them. The other set of protagonists deploys the word law in a more embracing sense, compelling opponents to carry the qualifying adjectives (State, formal, hard, enacted) when discussing the type of law that interests them. What is important is not to “prove” the “empirical truth” of either definition—itself a problematic exercise that rests on second-order definitions—, but rather to acknowledge the ideology and the objectives that drive the particular perspective chosen. On this problem generally, see Without the Law, supra note 15 at 3-4.

22. See Macdonald, supra note 17.

23. See, generally, Merry, S. E., “Legal Pluralism” (1988) 22 Law and Society Rev. 869 at 890CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “[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.”

24. Teubner, G., “The Two Faces of Janus: Rethinking Legal Pluralism” (1992) 13 Cardozo L. Rev. 1443 at 1443Google Scholar: “Legal pluralism rediscovers the subversive power of suppressed discourses.”

25. It bears notice, however, that the meaning of “Rule of Law” has undergone a transformation. The concern is not with whether, for example, legal officials appeal to some supposedly external standard to legitimate their actions; rather it is with their need to appeal directly to the conceptions of legitimacy and justice held by those in respect of which they purport to exercise their authority. The Law which imposes its Rule is not separate from either the “ruler” or the “ruled.” This point is developed in detail in Part 2 of this essay.

26. Wilhelmsson, T., “Legal Integration as Disintegration of National Law” in Petersen, H. & Zahle, H., eds., Legal Polycentricity: Consequences of Pluralism in Law (Aldershot, England: Dartmouth, 1995) at 128Google Scholar: “[T]he paradigmatic concept of law is still the (one and only) law of the national state” [emphasis in original].

27. Petersen & Zahle, eds., ibid. at 8.

28. This, of course, is simply an instantiation of a point made forcefully by Ludwig Wittgenstein. See Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G.E.M. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958) s. 115Google Scholar: “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.”

29. For explorations of how law constitutes subjectivity, see generally Schlag, P. et al. , ”Postmodernism and Law: A Symposium” (1991) 62 Colorado L. Rev. 439Google Scholar. See also Derrida, J., “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” (1990) 11 Cardozo L. Rev. 919Google Scholar; Douzinas, C. & Warrington, R., “The Face of Justice: A Jurisprudence of Alterity” (1994) 3 Social and Legal Studies 405CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sarat, A., “A Prophecy of Possibility: Metaphorical Exploration of Postmodern Legal Subjectivity” (1995) 29 Law and Society Rev. 615CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. Pospisil, L., Anthropology of Law: Comparative Theory (New York: Harper & Row, 1971)Google Scholar.

31. Smith, M. G., Corporations and Society (London: Duckworth, 1974)Google Scholar.

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33. Moore, ed., supra note 12.

34. See Manderson, D., “Beyond the Provincial: Space, Aesthetics, and Modernist Legal Theory” (1996) 20 Melbourne University L. Rev. 1048Google Scholar.

35. This is most explicit in writings of progressive legal pluralists such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos. See, for example, de Sousa Santos, B., “On Modes of Production of Law and Social Power” (1985) 13 International Journal of the Sociology of Law 299Google Scholar.

36. Fuss, D., Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995) at 40–42Google Scholar.

37. 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 Schlag, P., “Missing Pieces: A Cognitive Approach to Law” (1989) 67 Texas L. Rev. 1195 at 1208Google Scholar.

38. van Roermund, B., “Law is Narrative, not Literature” (1994) 23 Dutch Journal for Legal Philosophy and Legal Theory 221Google Scholar.

39. See Woodman, G. R., “Ideological Conflict and Social Observation: Recent Debate About Legal Pluralism” (1998) 40 Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial LawGoogle Scholar [forthcoming]

40. Teubner, supra note 24 at 1444.

41. See Merry, S. E., “Anthropology, Law, and Transitional Processes” (1992) 21 Annual Review of Anthropology 357 at 358CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and de Sousa Santos, B., “Law: A Map of Misreading. Toward a Postmodern Conception of Law” (1987) 14 Journal of Law and Society 279 at 298CrossRefGoogle Scholar. 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].

42. See the discussion in Tamanaha, B. Z., “An Analytical Map of Social Scientific Approaches to the Concept of Law” (1995) 15 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 501CrossRefGoogle Scholar [hereinafter “Social Scientific Approaches”].

43. 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”, supra note *; “A Hermeneutic Turn Through Narrative”, supra note *; “Multiple Selves and Legal Pluralism,” supra note *; “Critical Legal Pluralism,” supra note *.

44. 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 MacIntyre, A., After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) at 220Google Scholar: “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.” See also Bruner, J., Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) at 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “It can never be the case that there is a ‘self’ independent of one's cultural-historical existence.”

45. de Sousa Santos, B., “Three Metaphors for a New Conception of Law: The Frontier, the Baroque, and the South” (1995) 29 Law and Society Rev. 569 at 573CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. On the points raised in the next few paragraphs see, generally, McGuire, S. C., “Critical Legal Pluralism: A Thought-Piece on a Direction for Socio-legal Studies” (Doctoral dissertation, Faculty of Law, McGill University, 1996)Google Scholar [unpublished].

47. 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 King, M., “The Truth About Autopoiesis” (1993) 20 Journal of Law and Society 218CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. It is important to note here how power is being conceived of as having a dominating sense, a negative value. The effectivity of power has become the only universal standard through which cultures and histories can be evaluated by socialscientific legal pluralism. Instead, the focus should be on recognizing the creative, constructive, positive effects of power. This is not to deny structures of domination and their effect nor is it to deny the coercive operations that are masked by attention to law, but rather to emphasize the resistance to domination that is evidenced in subjects' creative capacity. For further discussion of the “overarching and integrating structures of domination” in mainstream legal pluralism, see Fitzpatrick, supra note 20.

49. King, supra note 47 at 223.

50. For a critique of autopoiesis along these lines, see “Social Scientific Approaches”, supra note 42.

51. Santi Romano, supra note 6 at 82–83. “En effet, si l'on peut parfaitement concevoir le droit sans l'État, il est impossible de définir l'état sans recourir au concept de droit.”

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53. For a similar argument made with regards to contemporary debates about modern constitutionalism and cultural diversity, see Tully, J., Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) at 58ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54. Wittgenstein, L., On Certainty, trans. Paul, D. & Anscombe, G. E. M. (London: Basil Blackwell, 1969) at para. 84ffGoogle Scholar.

55. 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, supra note 8, 211.

56. 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, supra note 24; “Social Scientific Approaches”, supra note 42.

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63. 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 Graham, C., “On the Seductiveness of Clarity and the Pain of Erasure” (Paper presented to the Association for Canadian Theatre Research Annual Conference, 1992)Google Scholar [unpublished].

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65. Even Teubner, who posits a “new” legal pluralism which relies on autopoietic approaches appeals to linear images: suggesting that the vertical image of relations between law and society be transformed into horizontal ones. See Teubner, supra note 24 at 1457.

66. The circular image is not intended to conjure the empty sphere of geometricians, rather it embodies the full sphere of being. See G. Bachelard, supra note 64 at 244; Jaspers, K., Von der Wahrheit (Munich: R. Piper, 1947) at 50Google Scholar: “Jedes Dasein Scheint in sich rund” (Every being seems in itself round).

67. See J.-G. Belley, “Le Pluralisme juridique chez Roderick Macdonald: Une Analyse séquentielle” in Lajoie, ed., supra note * [forthcoming].