Abstract
A Sense of Self-Suspicion: Global Legal Pluralism and the Claim to Legal Authority
Highlights
Countless authors today seize upon the lexicon of pluralism and use bits and pieces of legal-pluralist scholarship to overcome the impasses of mainstream legal theories vis-a-vis the deep metamorphoses of domestic legal systems
The jargon of pluralism has become both the symptom of a failure and the signpost to a new mindset: the failure of grand legal narratives based on the assumption that the state is the condition of possibility for any orderly society, and the mindset of the new generation of legal theorists who do not completely disavow such legal narratives, but bemoan their incapacity to come to grips with today’s globalized legal theatre
If we go back to the forerunners of legal pluralism, we are faced with a different attitude
Summary
As noted by many commentators,[12] globalization, coupled with the rise of global governance, transnational law, and supranational law, has shaken the common understanding of law as essentially on a par with the sovereignty of the state. An important factor to be taken into account for explaining GLP concerns the kind of controversies which inspired these legal theorists They believed that the relations among supranational normative bodies as well as the relations among regional or subnational authorities should be understood as an actual instantiation of legal pluralism.[18] In this way, international lawyers availed themselves of CLP scholarship as a toolkit to account for the realities of international and transnational legal orders.[19] In this regard, to best penetrate GLP, it is important to juxtapose it with an alternative, authoritative approach to the proliferation and potential collisions among transnational legal bodies, namely, constitutional pluralism (hereinafter CP).[20] This contrast will allow us to foreground the (truly pluralist) aspiration of GLP to overhaul the semantic repertoire of legal theory. The attention paid by this stream of scholarship to global functional differentiation, alternative systemic rationalities, the importance of private and informal actors, and the proliferation of norm-creating sites, makes this approach impermeable to the criticisms leveled against GLP.[22]
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