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Legal Pluralism, Plurality of Laws, and Legal Practices:
Theories, Critiques, and Praxiological Re-specification
Baudouin Dupret
Legal pluralism has become a major theme in socio-legal studies. However, under this very broad denomination, one can identify many different trends which share little but the very basic idea that law is much more than state law. Despite their eclectic character, these many conceptions of legal pluralism also share some common fundamental premises concerning the nature of law, its function, and its relationship with its cultural milieu. This contribution aims at critically addressing these premises and at suggesting some re- specification of the question of law, its plural sources, and the many practices that enfold in relationship with it. In its spirit, this re-specification can be characterised as realistic and praxiological.
Indeed, I shall argue that it is at best useless and at worst wrong to start from a label like “legal pluralism” so as to describe something which is presumed to be an instance of such label. My contention here is that law is what people consider as law, nothing more nothing less, and that occurrences of legal plurality are limited to these situations where people explicitly orient themselves to the fragmented spectrum of law. Instead of looking at the hypothetical pluralistic model of law which something like, e.g. , Egyptian law, would be an instance of, the task of social scientists is, rather, to describe the situations, the mechanisms and the processes through which people orient to something legal which they identify as pluralistic. This position is grounded on a principle of indifference, by which one seeks to avoid normative and evaluative engagements: the focus is put on the description of practices, not on their evaluation. Moreover, this position is based on the refusal of any ironic standpoint, i.e. the denial that social scientists occupy any kind of overhanging position vis-à- vis the social, by which they would be entitled to “reveal” to “self-deceived people” the truth which is concealed from them because of their “lack of critical distance”, “ignorance” and/or “bad faith”.
(^) Professor at the Université de Louvaine (Belgium) and researcher at the CNRS/ISP (Cachan). His research focuses on the sociological study of the Law within the context of contemporary Arabic societies.
In a first section, I shall briefly describe the main trends in the field of legal pluralism, from its historical scientific background to its more recent theories. In a second section, I formulate some of the major criticisms which can be addressed to the postulates sustaining these many versions of legal pluralism. These critical stances vis-à-vis the legal pluralistic study of law articulate around three main questions, i.e. the definitional problem, the functionalist premises, and the culturalist conception which undermine existing theories. I shall argue, in the third section, that realism is a possible remedy to these flaws. However, these are best addressed through what I call a praxiological re-specification of the whole issue of legal pluralism, which I shall illustrate through the study of Egyptian cases. In conclusion, I shall formulate some remarks on praxiology as a way to fill the “missing-what” of classical socio-legal studies.
I. People’s law and state-law: Old dispute and current trends
A. The many layers of social control
Reactions to dogmatic conceptions of law are as old as social sciences. According to Durkheim, law is a social phenomenon, which reflects all the essential varieties of social solidarity. Building on Durkheim’s legacy, Marcel Mauss formulated the idea that, within a society, there can be many legal systems interacting with each other. However, it is Bronislaw Malinowski who first gave a definition of law that strongly associates it with the notion of social control. According to Malinowski, law should be defined “by function and not by form”.^1 There are many societies who lack any centralised institution enforcing the law, but there is no society which is deprived from these rules which “are felt and regarded as the obligations of one person and the rightful claims of another”.^2 His reasoning operates in the following way: (1) the function of law is to maintain social order; (2) social order can be found in regularised patterns of actual behaviour; (3) the complex of social obligations constitutes the binding mechanism maintaining social order; (4) legal norms are norms abstracted from actual patterns of behaviour and law is identical with social control.^3 Accordingly, law is as plural as social life itself, of which it represents the rules which are
(^1) B. MALINOWSKI , ‘Introduction’ in H.I. HOGBIN , Law and Order in Polynesia , New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934, p. xiii. 2 3 B. MALINOWSKI ,^ Crime and Custom In Savage Society , London, Routledge, 1926, p. 55. B. TAMAHA , Realistic Socio-Legal Theory: Pragmatism and A Social Theory Of Law , Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 104.
law (bringing together individuals so as to constitute a collective entity). The latter is clearly non-statist, since it corresponds to the multiplicity of legal systems which social law generates. Gurvitch makes also an important distinction between the plurality of the sources of law and legal pluralism.^9 Gurvitch’s theory did not receive very much attention. This may be attributed to different reasons, among which his vague, fanciful, complex and abstract language, on the one hand, and the fact that “his concept of ‘social law’ challenged and disturbed the traditional juristic notion of law which was founded on a state-centralistic ideology”.^10
B. Law and the many social fields
The seventies and the eighties witnessed the blossoming of a more fully integrated attempt to deal with law from a social perspective denying the state its monopoly on, and even its mastering of, the production of law. In his radicalism, John Griffiths’ article “What Is Legal Pluralism”^11 might prove instrumental for describing the basic tenets of this new trend. Moreover, it remains a seminal contribution in the field.^12 Griffiths first identifies his main enemy: legal centralism, the law of which “is an exclusive, systematic and unified hierarchical ordering of normative propositions, which can be looked at either from the top downwards as depending on a sovereign command (Bodin, 1576; Hobbes, 1651; Austin, 1832) or from the bottom upwards as deriving their validity from ever more general layers of norms until one reaches some ultimate norm(s)” (Kelsen, 1949; Hart, 1961).^13 Claiming that legal centralism is an ideology, he charges many social scientists with having confused a normative stance and a descriptive one. According to him, law does not exist where the heralds of legal centralism
(^9) N. ROULAND , Anthropologie juridique , Paris, PUF, 1988. (^10) R. BANAKAR , ‘Integrating Reciprocal Perspectives.On Georges Gurvitch’s Sociology of Law’, Oñati Prize Essay in Sociology of Law , Oñati/Internet, 2000. One can consider that L. Pospisil’s conception of “legal levels” does not stand far away from Gurvitch’s concept of social law. According to Pospisil, societies are never fully integrated. On the contrary, society is a mosaic of subgroups that belong to certain types with different memberships, composition, and degree of inclusiveness, every such subgroup largely owing its existence “to a legal system that is its own and that regulates the behavior of its members”, L. POSPISIL , Anthropology of Law: A Comparative Theory 11 , New York, Harper & Row, 1971. 12 J. GRIFFITHS , ‘What Is Legal Pluralism’,^ Journal of Legal Pluralism , No 24, pp. 1-55. Although other contributions are certainly as important as Griffiths’. See, for instance, M. GALANTER , “Justice in Many Rooms: Courts, Private Ordering, and Indigenous Law”, Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law , No 19. As a whole, Griffiths’ approach to legal pluralism is mainly represented in the Commission on Folk-Law and Legal Pluralism and in the Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, in which the influential presence of Dutch scholarship must be stressed. Among other prominent representatives of this “school”, we might mention Gordon Woodman, Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda- Beckmann, and Fons Strijbosch. (^13) J. GRIFFITHS , o.c. , p. 3.
have claimed it to be: legal centralism would be “a myth, an ideal, a claim, an illusion”,^14 whereas legal pluralism would be the fact. Griffiths then proceeds to the distinction between what he calls weak and strong definitions of legal pluralism. The former refers to legal systems in which the sovereign commands or validates or recognises different bodies of law for different groups in the population; if it is a weak conception of legal pluralism, it is however mainly a (weak) conception of legal centralism, for it gives the central state the ultimate power to acknowledge or refuse the existence of such different bodies of law. The strong definition of legal pluralism, on the other hand, is the one which is, according to Griffiths, directly concerned with “an empirical state of affairs in society”,^15 not with mere ideology. It is to the yardstick of such distinction between weak and strong definitions that Griffiths evaluates existing descriptive conceptions of legal pluralism. Griffiths concludes by giving his definition of law and legal pluralism. As to law, it is the self-regulation of every social field - law becomes therefore synonymous with social control; with regard to legal pluralism, it becomes the legal organisation of society, which is “congruent with its social organisation”.^16
Sally Falk Moore has been unanimously applauded among legal pluralists for having provided the appropriate locus of law in socio-legal research. She claims that “the social structure” is composed of many “semi-autonomous social fields”, the definition and boundaries of which are not given by their organisation, but “by a processual characteristic, the fact that it can generate rules and coerce or induce compliance to them”.^17 Three characteristics of Moore’s concept can explain the appeal it exercised: first, she presents these fields as the fundamental unit of social control, which is directly connected to behavioural norms of conduct; second, every individual may simultaneously belong to many social fields, which accounts for social complexity;^18 third, a social field is autonomous, i.e. it can resist the penetration of external norms, but never totally, its capacity of resistance being function of
(^14) Ibid. , p. 4. (^15) Ibid. , p. 8. (^16) Ibid. , p. 38. (^17) S.F. MOORE , Law as Process : An Anthropological Approach , London, Henley and Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, p. 57. (^18) The semi-autonomous social field “can generate rules and customs and symbols internally, but […] is also vulnerable to rules and decisions and other forces emanating from the larger world by which it is surrounded. The semi-autonomous social field has rule-making capacities, and the means to induce or coerce compliance; but it is simultaneously set in a larger social matrix which can, and does, affect and invade it, sometimes at the invitation of persons inside it, sometimes at its own instance”, S.F. MOORE , ‘Law and Social Change: The Semi-Autonomous Social Field as an Appropriate Subject of Study”, Law & Society Review , Vol. 7, p. 720.
Many scholars, like Vanderlinden,^22 made the assumption that, because of the existing gap between legal practices and formal textual legal provisions, there is a plurality of laws. Instead of seeing in these practices the sad effect of the inefficiency of law, it should be read, following these authors, as the positive manifestation of their conformity to other legal orderings.^23 According to some of these scholars, these alternative legal orderings are totally independent from state law, whereas, according to others, the state remains the gravity point of these practices. However, all converge in challenging the legitimacy of state law. Today, the classical theme of conflict resolution seems to constitute the focal point of this program. This interest in the anthropology of conflict may be traced back to American legal realism and Llewellyn’s “trouble case method”,^24 and more recently to Laura Nader and Harry Todd’s Disputing Process^25 and Simon Roberts’ Order and Dispute.^26
C. Plural legal pluralism: Culturalism, post-modernism, autopoiesis
According to Brian Tamanaha, “since there are many competing versions of what is meant by ‘law’, the assertion that law exists in plurality leaves us with a plurality of legal pluralisms”.^27 Besides Griffith’s and Moore’s influential conceptions of legal pluralism, there exist other approaches worth mentioning.
Massaji Chiba’s theory of non-official laws stays a little apart from the different orientations described above. The main endeavour of this Japanese scholar is “less to develop or clarify a definition of legal pluralism than to develop or clarify the features of certain
(^22) A.J. ARNAUD , Le droit trahi par la sociologie , Paris, Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1998; J.G. BELLEY , Le contrat, entre droit, économie et société , Québec, Les éditions Yvon Blais, 1998; J.F. PERRIN 23 , Sociologie empirique du droit , Bâle, Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1997. E. SERVERIN , Sociologie du droit , Paris, La Découverte, 2000. The following paragraph is directly borrowed from this book. (^24) K.N. LLEWELLYN and E.A. HOEBEL , The Cheyenne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence 25 , Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1941. L. NADER and H. TODD , The Disputing Process: Law in Ten Societies , New York, Columbia University Press, 1978. 26 S. ROBERTS , Order and Dispute: An Introduction to Legal Anthropology , Harmondsworth, Penguin Books,
- Also, J. COMAROFF and S. ROBERTS , Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context , Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981. Recently, Marie-Claire Foblets edited a special issue of the Journal of Legal Pluralism on the theme of “popular justice”: M.C. FOBLETS , “Popular Justice: Conflict Resolution within Communities”, 27 Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law , No 36, 1996. B.Z. TAMANAHA , “A Non-Essentialist Version of Legal Pluralism”, Journal of Law and Society , 2000, Vol. 27, No 2, pp. 296-321, at p. 297.
instances of legal pluralism”.^28 Instead of simply opposing state law and people’s law, Chiba identifies many legal levels: official law, i.e. “the legal system authorised by the legitimate authority of a country”;^29 unofficial law, i.e. “the legal system which is not officially authorised by the official authorities, but authorised in practice by the general consensus of a certain circle of people”^30 - and having a distinctive influence upon the effectiveness of the official law; legal postulates, i.e. “the system of values and ideals specifically relevant to both official and unofficial law in founding and orienting the latter”.^31 These three levels are not organised according to a rigid and permanent hierarchy, but differ from one society to another. For instance, Eastern societies would be characterised by their reliance on unofficial law, whereas Western ones would be mainly state-centred. Besides these legal levels, Chiba identifies three dichotomies of law: official law vs. unofficial law, legal rules vs. legal postulates, and indigenous law vs. transplanted law.^32 It is in the combination of these many levels and dichotomies that the law of each individual country could be analyzed. This analytical scheme serves “to advance social sciences of non-Western law with respect to the alleged cultural lag or legal pluralism”.^33
With the emergence of the “concept” of post-modernity, scholars oriented their research in legal pluralism toward a new definition. Boaventura de Sousa Santos is the main representative of this trend that seeks to forge a post-modern conception of law based on the notions of legal pluralism and interlegality, that is, “encompassing both the social constructions of normative orders and the human experiencing of them”.^34 Santos states: “legal pluralism is the key concept in a post-modern view of law. Not the legal pluralism of traditional legal anthropology in which the different 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 legal
(^28) G. WOODMAN , “Ideological Combat and Social Observation”, o.c. (^29) M. CHIBA , “Three Dichotomies of Law in Pluralism: An Analytical Scheme of Legal Culture”, Tokai Law Review 30 , 1987, pp. 1-11, at p. 173. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 M. CHIBA , “Three Dichotomies of Law in Pluralism”,^ o.c. , pp. 177-179. M. CHIBA , “Introduction”, in M. CHIBA , Sociology of Law in Non-Western Countries , Oñati, Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, 1993, p. 13. 34 A. GUEVARA-GIL , J. THOME , “Notes on Legal Pluralism”, Beyond Law , 1992, No 5, pp. 75-102, at p.
single function, while various functions are identifiable. Then, he defines legal pluralism “as a multiplicity of diverse communicative processes that observe social action under the binary code of legal / illegal”.^41 This binary code of legal/illegal is constituted as the discriminating factor, which allows excluding “purely economic calculations” as well as “sheer pressures of power and merely conventional or moral norms, transactional patterns or organisational routines”.^42 This binary code is not peculiar to state law, but “it creates instead the imagery of a heterarchy of diverse legal discourses”.^43 Finally, it serves many functions, including inter alia, “social control, conflict regulation, reaffirmation of expectations, social regulation, coordination of behaviour or the disciplining of bodies and souls”.^44
II. Critiques
According to Merry, Moore’s concept of semi-autonomous social field remains “the most enduring, generalisable, and widely-used conception of plural legal order”.^45 Such statement reveals how little criticism has been addressed to the concept and the propositions associated to it.^46 It also reflects the increasing support the radical theory of legal pluralism received. Nowadays, legal anthropology, the sociology of law and legal theory must pay it tribute. Nevertheless, critiques which may be addressed are many. In the following section, I shall organise these critiques around what can appear as the three main fundamental flaws undermining existing legal pluralistic theories: its definitional problem, its functionalist nature, and its holistic essentialist culturalism.
A. Definitional deadlock
Griffiths explicitly identifies the ideology of legal centralism as what legal pluralism set out to challenge. While the state portrays itself as sole lawmaker, legal pluralism highlights the multitude of partially autonomous and self-regulating social fields also producing legal rules. However, there is a strong case for moving away from the present
(^41) G. TEUBNER , “The Two Faces of Janus: Rethinking Legal Pluralism”, Cardozo Law Review , 1992, pp. 1443-62, at p. 14. 42 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 G. TEUBNER , “The Two Faces of Janus: Rethinking Legal Pluralism”,^ o.c. , p. 15. 46 S.E. MERRY ,^ o.c. , p. 878. G. WOODMAN , ‘Ideological Combat and Social Observation: Recent Debate About Legal Pluralism’, Journal of Legal Pluralism , 1998.
dichotomisation of the analysis of the phenomenon of law between state law and legal pluralism.
Brian Tamanaha reveals some of the many weaknesses in the reasoning of the proponents of legal pluralism, among which the “conclusion that all forms of social control are law”.^47 As Merry puts it, “calling all forms of ordering that are not state law by the name law confounds the analysis”.^48 The problem can be attributed to the confusion between descriptive and non-descriptive concepts. Law belongs to the latter, at least in the sense that it was never constituted as a tool in the hand of sociologists for describing social reality. When they establish law as a synonymous with social norms, legal pluralists create an ambiguity, since they use a word which has some commonsense meaning so as to perform an analytical task which runs contrary to this meaning. In other words, what is the analytical utility of using the word “law” so as to describe what common sense would never associate with law (good manners, etc. ), especially if this alleged concept either does not carry anything which makes it distinct from other less connoted words (like norm) or surreptitiously carries the distinctive characters of what it is supposed to be contrary to?
Tamanaha goes further and states that, “lived norms are qualitatively different from norms recognised and applied by legal institutions because the latter involves ‘positivising’ the norms, that is, the norms become ‘legal’ norms when they are recognised as such by legal actors”.^49 Contrary to what I claimed in another article,^50 this critique is most sound, though the dividing line is not so much between lived norms and positivised norms but between law as recognised and referred to by people -whoever they are- and other moralities and normativities as recognised and referred to by people - whoever they are.^51 In other words, law is not an analytical concept, but only what people claim that law is, this type of position allowing denying the relevance of a question that a hundred years of legal sociology and anthropology have been unable to settle - the question of the boundaries of juridicity. The existence of law is evidenced only by its self-affirmation or, rather, by its identification as such by people. This does not preclude the study of normativity in general, on the contrary,
(^47) B.Z. TAMANAHA , “The Folly of the ‘Social Scientific’ Concept of Legal Pluralism”, Journal of Law and Society 48 , 1993, pp. 192-217, at p. 193. 49 S.E. MERRY , “Legal Pluralism”,^ o.c. , p. 878. 50 B.Z. TAMANAHA , “The Folly of the ‘Social Scientific’ Concept of Legal Pluralism”,^ o.c. , p. 208. B. DUPRET , “Legal Pluralism, Normative Plurality, and the Arab World”, in B. DUPRET , M. BERGER , L. AL-ZWAINI , Legal Pluralism in the Arab World , The Hague, Kluwer Law International, 1999. (^51) See infra , section 4.
human relations, might be given a social function, law, when it is understood as emanating from the social, might hardly be given such a function. Otherwise, it would mean as a consequence that societies would be credited from scratch (from before their existing as societies) with a collective consciousness, which in turn would result in their creating the institutions necessary to their functioning, i.e. they would have created themselves. In other words, functional analysis can only operate if law is considered as the product of an intentional agency.
Yet, some legal pluralists consider law as the product of an intentional agency. This is the case with Teubner, for whom the multiple orders of legal pluralism exclude “merely social conventions and moral norms”, recharacterized by their common organizing “on the binary code legal/illegal,” and “may serve many functions: social control, conflict regulation, reaffirmation of expectations, social regulation, coordination of behaviour or the disciplining of bodies and souls”.^56 However, this “legalistic” version of legal pluralism is only a partial solution to the problem of functionalism. Indeed, when considering that law is multi- functional or even dysfunctional, it still assumes that legal institutions have been created so as systematically to perform one function or another. This leaves no room for their being non- functional. Moreover, these systems are, according to Teubner, autopoietic, i.e. they are radically autonomous subsystems which communicationally produce and reproduce their components within the system (the system is operationally closed).^57 The remaining question is: Has law been intentionally created so as independently to perform social functions? This is historically and empirically dubious. Obviously, parts of law were crafted so as to perform functions (though they never succeeded in being totally efficient in performing them). Clearly as well, other parts of law were not conceived in such a way. If there are many legal constructors, there was never any Creator of the Concept of Law, although such an intention remains necessary for the sake of functional analysis.
C. Essentialist culturalism
Legal pluralism has also often proved very essentialist and culturalist. Generally with the best intentions, some legal pluralists promoted concepts like “folk law,” “indigenous law,”
(^56) G. TEUBNER , “The Two Faces of Janus”, o.c. , p. 15. (^57) For an excellent and concise summary, see K. BÄLZ , “Shari‘a and Qanun in Egyptian Law: A Systems Theory Approach to Legal Pluralism”, Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law , 1995, pp. 37-53, at pp. 40-
“native law,” “imported law,” “transplanted law,” “state law,” “official law,” “unofficial law,” “primitive law,” etc.. Besides the huge definitional problems associated with the term “law,” it mainly assumes that there is something like a “true” law, which is the reflection of an “authentic” society whose main cultural characters are translated into rules of conduct. Actually, this kind of “nativist” interpretation is not worth any close examination. It offers a very naïve picture of law which is far from being supported by substantial empirical evidence. The so-called “indigenous” or “native” law has often never existed but in the heads of these scholars, though it is constituted as the yardstick to which the scope of legal “acculturation” is evaluated.
Much more interesting is Clifford Geertz’s interpretive theory. This is not the proper place to discuss it. Suffice to say that he conceives of law as a cultural code of meanings for interpreting the world: “‘Law’ here, there, or anywhere, is part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real”.^58 In this hermeneutic project, “words are keys to understanding the social institutions and cultural formulations that surround them and give them meaning”.^59 Geertz gives the example of the Arabic word “ haqq ”, which is supposed to come from a specific moral world and to connect to a distinctive legal sensibility.^60 This word would carry along with it all the specific meanings which are co-substantial with something which is called “Islamic law.” In plural situations, i.e. situations where many cultural systems are described as interacting (for instance Egypt, where modern law is commonly presented as co-existing with Islamic law and customary law), law would produce a “polyglot discourse”.^61 In that sense, pluralism would only be the juxtaposition of many cultural and legal histories.
However, culturalism fundamentally conceives of law in holistic terms, that is, as one of the many reverberations of a larger explaining principle: culture.^62 Yet, this cultural unity is not deduced from empirical observations, but assumed from the beginning. This is how Rosen proceeds when, starting from the small Moroccan town of Sefrou, he ends his journey
(^58) C. GEERTZ , Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropolog , New York, Basic Books, 1983, p. 184. 59 60 S.E. MERRY , “Legal Pluralism”,^ o.c. , p. 886. 61 C. GEERTZ ,^ Local Knowledge ,^ o.c. , p. 185. 62 Ibid. , p. 226. Lawrence Rosen describes it as “a set of orientations which gains its very life by reverberating through numerous analytically separable domains so as to appear immanent in all of them” and as “commonsense assumptions about features that cross-cut virtually all domains of law and life - assumptions about human nature, particular kinds of relationships, the ‘meaning’ of given acts”; L. ROSEN , “Legal Pluralism and Cultural Unity in Morocco”, in B. DUPRET, M. BERGER and L. AL-ZWAINI , o.c. , p. 90.
political theory (state law) for a sociological tool (legal pluralism). Third, it is to assume a functional definition of some general social mechanisms (social control), whereas non- intentional phenomena cannot be given any social function. Instead of elevating law to the rank of an analytical instrument, I would suggest to go back to the observation of social practices and to consider, in the broad field of the many normativities, that law is what people refer to as law.
This is what advocates Tamanaha, according to whom “the project to devise a scientific concept of law was based upon the misguided belief that law comprises a fundamental category. […] Law is whatever we attach the label law to. It is a term conventionally applied to a variety of multifaceted, multifunctional phenomena”.^66 In other words, “what law is, is determined by the people in the social arena through their own common usages, not in advance by the social scientist or theorist”.^67 Accordingly, a situation of legal pluralism would exist “whenever more than one kind of ‘law’ is recognised through the social practices of a group in a given social arena”.^68 Tamanaha argues that, whereas legal pluralism states that the word law applies to the many manifestations of a single basic phenomenon, conversely his approach would assume that the same label law applies to many different phenomena.
Tamanaha claims that his approach conveys many advantages. Besides the fact that, first, it overcomes the inability to distinguish legal norms from social norms, second, it provides practicable criteria for distinguishing between a legal rule-system and normative pluralisms. Third, it urges that all these forms of law-recognised-as-such in one specific social arena “be studied in their specific manifestation, and in their relations with other kinds of law in that social arena, and as they compare to general categories of kinds of law or manifestations of law in other social arenas”.^69 Fourth, this approach does not lose, through its elaboration, what made the force of the legal pluralistic appeal, i.e. that there are forms of law which are not or only loosely connected to the state. By so doing, this approach would be successful, according to Tamanaha, precisely where legal pluralism has failed, that is, in providing a descriptive non-ideological theory of the plural nature of law. “Indeed, one merit
(^66) B.Z. TAMANAHA , Realistic Socio-Legal Theory , o.c. , p. 128. (^67) B.Z. TAMANAHA , “A Non-Essentialist Version of Legal Pluralism”, o.c. , p. 314. (^68) Ibid. , p. 315. (^69) Ibid. , p. 318.
of this approach -what makes it non-essentialist- is that it is entirely free of presuppositions about law (beyond the negative one that it has no essence). Everything is left open to empirical investigation, and category construction and analysis following such investigation. Another significant merit [is that] it directs an equally sharp-eyed, unsentimental view at all manifestations and kinds of law”.^70 In sum, conducting research in legal pluralism is to look at situations where there is a plurality of kinds of law, law being understood as what people conventionally refer to as law.
B. Praxiology
In this last section, it will be argued that, even though Tamanaha’s approach greatly betters the sociological study of law, it still suffers from some flaws which can be mitigated by the deepening of his insights and by the adoption of a praxiological approach to legal phenomena.
The main problem with Tamanaha’s conception of law comes from his attempt to root it in the combination of behaviourism and interpretivism, a combination which is deemed to overcome some of the classical caveats of legal sociology and anthropology and to come out in his realistic socio-legal theory. However, as mentioned above, one of the difficulties of interpretivism is related to its culturalist essentialist standpoint. It is not to say that such perspective has no scientific value, but it points to the fact that it reproduces some of the deficiencies it is supposed to eliminate. Among other things, it maintains one of these dualities which muddy contemporary sociological theorizing, that is, the duality opposing activities and meanings. Instead of considering that this opposition constitutes the main problem to be solved in order to succeed in theorizing, I suggest that it is the propensity to theorizing itself which should be questioned. In other words, the inquiry “into the comprehensibility of society , into the ways in which social life can be understood and described when seen from within by members” should be substituted to the theoretical elaboration of “a specific mode of comprehending society, a theoretical framework within which a substantive conception of society is to be construed”.^71 It is definitely not Geertz’s interpretivist culturalism -not to say Rosen’s- that will promote such an inquiry, for he
(^70) Ibid. , pp. 318-319. (^71) W. SHARROCK and R. WATSON , “Autonomy among social theories: The incarnation of social structures”, in G. FIELDING , Actions and Structures , London, Sage Publications, 1988, p. 59.
whereas Tamanaha rightly criticises legal pluralism for its over-inclusiveness, i.e. its including phenomena most people would not consider to be law, and its under-inclusiveness, i.e. its excluding phenomena many would consider to be law,^77 he queers the pitch by underestimating people’s practical and context-sensitive understanding of the word “law” or its equivalents. Thus, people do not loosely use one same word so as to refer to different phenomena they specifically use one word to refer to some specific phenomenon to the production and intelligibility of which they orient in the local and temporal context in which they interact. The same word might be used to refer to another phenomenon in another context or in another sequence, but this is a question which must be empirically answered through the close examination of each interactional occurrence taking place in every specific setting. This runs against the interpretivist notion of the legal polyglot discourse. In that sense the notion of legal pluralism does not exist as a sociological question unless people, participants, or members orient to it as such. In other words, the question of legal pluralism does not arise from scholars looking at the social world from outside, but it becomes a topic in its own right when it comes out from people’s practices that they orient to a situation of co- existing, conflating and/or conflicting multiple laws.
Finally, with regard to the questions that the realistic approach to legal phenomena might raise, my contention is that they are better solved by adopting a praxiological perspective. The first question concerns the identity of the people whose practices qualify a phenomenon as law. While the realistic theory answers that it is any social group, the praxiological would rather say that there is no such question unless or until people call into question the authority of someone or something having identified a phenomenon as law. The question only emerges from practical, local, punctual circumstances. Before, it is a question of a philosophical and political nature, not a practical and sociological one. To the question of how many people are necessary to view a phenomenon as law for this phenomenon to qualify as such, it is answered that “a minimum threshold to qualify is if sufficient people with sufficient conviction consider something to be ‘law’, and act pursuant to this belief, in ways that have an influence in the social arena”.^78 This answer suffers from its giving to whatever external authority the task subsequently to determine how people, conviction and influence rate so as to be considered as sufficient, whereas it would be said in a praxiological perspective that no answer can be given a priori , since it is from people’s practices that the
(^77) Ibid. , p. 315. (^78) Ibid. , p. 319.
qualification of something as law will be recognised as such (and thus will remained unnoticed) or will not be recognised as such (and thus will be noticed and become accountable). It is also said that a third question would address the risk of a proliferation of kinds of law in the social arena. Tamanaha’s answer is that such a profusion of kinds of law will seldom occur in practice. To the same question, the praxiological answer would be that it is not up to social scientists to decide by the means of concepts whether there are too many or too few kinds of law, but it is an empirical phenomenon which must be attended to through a close scrutiny of people’s practices. Moreover, since activities in legal settings are characterised, as human activities in general, by the general orientation to the production of intelligibility, coordination and order, it would be rather surprising to observe such an anarchical proliferation of laws without observable attempts to reduce it. The last question addresses the authority which is granted by conventionalism to social actors to give rise to new kinds of law. The realistic answer stresses that law as a social institution is necessarily produced by social actors and that recognizing these actors’ authority only threatens social and legal theorists’ authority. This holds true in a praxiological perspective. Moreover, it should be said that it is not up to legal sociologists and anthropologists to determine whether or not granting social actors the authority to give rise to new laws. What social sciences only can do is to observe and describe how actual people in actual settings orient to the production of a phenomenon which they call law.
C. What is legal pluralism in a praxiological perspective?
To illustrate the heuristic gains of the praxiological re-specification, I shall briefly present three cases concerning the issue of customary marriage in the Egyptian context. It should contribute to the strengthening of my contention according to which the theories of legal pluralism have little heuristic capacity in the explanation of the law, whose pluralistic character must not be determined by some external criterion, but only when it belongs explicitly to the relevancies of situated practices.
In Egypt, a series of laws organise personal status, i.e. , the regulations concerning marriage, divorce, affiliation, and inheritance. The law always encouraged the contracting of formal marriages registered by a notary whose authority is officially acknowledged. However, marriages satisfying minimal conditions, i.e. , being established in a contractual form and testified to by two witnesses, are deemed legitimate. Nevertheless, contrary to official
