Global Legal Pluralism

TLDR

Legal globalization faces challenges similar to those of legal pluralism, including the irreducible plurality of legal orders, coexistence of domestic law with other orders, and lack of a superior hierarchical position. The review examines how legal pluralism interacts with legal globalization and outlines future prospects for global legal pluralism as both theory and practice. It analyzes interrelations among legal orders and proposes theoretical and practical approaches to manage them. The study shows that disciplines such as comparative law, conflict of laws, public international law, and EU law are gradually adopting legal pluralism concepts, while traditional themes of law, state, community, and space are reshaped by globalization.

Abstract

Some challenges of legal globalization closely resemble those formulated earlier for legal pluralism: the irreducible plurality of legal orders, the coexistence of domestic state law with other legal orders, the absence of a hierarchically superior position transcending the differences. This review discusses how legal pluralism engages with legal globalization and how legal globalization utilizes legal pluralism. It demonstrates how several international legal disciplines—comparative law, conflict of laws, public international law, and European Union law—have slowly begun to adopt some ideas of legal pluralism. It shows how traditional themes and questions of legal pluralism—the definition of law, the role of the state, of community, and of space—are altered under conditions of globalization. It addresses interrelations between different legal orders and various ways, both theoretical and practical, to deal with them. And it provides an outlook on the future of global legal pluralism as theory and practice of global law.