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Legal Pluralism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Sally Engle Merry
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Extract

The intellectual odyssey of the concept of legal pluralism moves from the discovery of indigenous forms of law among remote African villagers and New Guinea tribesmen to debates concerning the pluralistic qualities of law under advanced capitalism. In the last decade, the concept of legal pluralism has been applied to the study of social and legal ordering in urban industrial societies, primarily the United States, Britain, and France. Indeed, given a sufficiently broad definition of the term legal system, virtually every society is legally plural, whether or not it has a colonial past. Legal pluralism is a central theme in the reconceptualization of the law/society relation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 22 , Issue 5 , 1988 , pp. 869 - 896
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This article was completed in February, 1988 and covers literature from 1978 to early 1988. I am grateful to Peter Fitzpatrick, John Griffiths, Christine Harrington, Robert Hayden, Stuart Henry, and June Starr for helpful suggestions and comments on earlier drafts.

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