Legal Pluralism

Appeals to the existence of “legal pluralism” have become very common in recent years. The term is now applied to a very wide range of phenomena including Indigenous reconciliation; international law; the self-regulation of transnational economic actors; the accommodation of religious difference; administrative law; access to justice; and alternative dispute resolution. Legal pluralism refers to the co-existence of more than one legal order in the same (or overlapping or interacting) social space. It is not so much a theory as the realisation that we live in a legally plural world and that we had better understand that world and how to navigate within it.