INTRODUCTION

Law, like religion, is a virtually universal feature of human society – law, that is, understood in its simplest sense, as the organizing structure for collective life. All societies have law. Law, like religion, is also enormously varied across space and time and has been variously theorized throughout history. Indeed, there is much evidence that, as with religious pluralism, legal pluralism is a better description of the natural state of the case than the singular “rule of law” now often imagined and celebrated as a unitary and a historical desideratum. We may learn more, in other words, about what the great legal comparativist Karl Llewellyn called “law-stuff,” in all societies, by assuming multiplicity, whatever the structure of official power, than by accepting the narrow positivist reading of law employed by most scholars today. Yet law continues to be understood by many to derive its authority and definition exclusively from the sovereign modern state, pushing to the side and to the past many rival normative structures – including religion.

The nature of law is, of course, the subject of an extensive literature. I begin with law in the context of this book because it seems often to be the case that scholars of religion who see religion as multiplicitous and variously embedded in cultures nonetheless accept modern law's account of itself as lacking those qualities, notwithstanding overwhelming evidence to the contrary. One's model of law, as of religion, necessarily affects how one understands the interaction of law and religion and, importantly, the possibility of their separation.