European Legal Encounters between Minority and Majority Cultures: Cases of Interlegality

Abstract

Local, national and international legal orders affect each other continuously through the selective ways people choose to use them. The neologism ‘interlegality’ will be used to cover this process where local law usually yields to the superior force of a dominant national system and adopts many features of the majority law; but there is also a ‘reverse interlegality’ when the local legal sensibilities and practices in some respects affect the dominant ones. In this article the concept of interlegality is set out, and an introduction given to a collection of papers containing three sets of reflections on legal encounters and interlegality between a minority culture and a majority culture. Acton analyses the legal position of the Travellers (Gypsies) under state law in the UK and contextualizes this in terms of a general discussion of how Gypsy law interacts with state law among different groups of Gypsies in various parts of the world. Svensson gives a similar analysis for the Sámi in Norway. Proulx provides a striking Canadian example of reverse interlegality by showing how local Aboriginal justice affects non-Aboriginal national justice through the channels of new institutions.