Applied Legal Pluralism: Processes, Driving Forces and Effects By Ghislain Otis, Jean LeClair, and Sophie Thériault, London: Routledge, 2022, 284 pp., £130.00
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| Author | PAUL SCHIFF BERMAN |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12448 |
DOI: 10.1111/j ols.12448
BOOK REVIEW
Applied Legal Pluralism: Processes, Driving
Forces and Effects
By Ghislain Otis, Jean LeClair, and Sophie Thériault, London: Routledge,
2022, 284 pp., £130.00
PAUL SCHIFF BERMAN
The George Washington University LawSchool, G eorge WashingtonUniversity, 2000 H. St. NW, Washington, DC,
20052, USA
Email: paulberman@gwu.edu
Can the study of legal pluralism help to inform the design of legal procedures, institutions, and
practices?1
This is a fraught question. After all, legal pluralism has generally been a descriptive enterprise,
not a normative one. Legal pluralists have recognized that societies consist of multiple overlap-
ping normative communities. These communities are sometimes state based but sometimes not,
and they are sometimes formal, official, and governmental, but again sometimes they are not. Plu-
ralists have thereforedef ined their task principally as an exercisein thick description: cataloguing
the inevitable contestation or legal hybridity that arises when multiple legal or quasi-legal systems
occupy the same social space, as well as the resulting strategic interactions that occur among those
navigating the various regimes.2
This is not to say, of course, that legal pluralism as a scholarly project was (or ever could be)
devoid of implicit values and normative biases. Indeed, one might say that two strong normative
undercurrents have always animated legalpluralism. First, legal pluralism was an attack on legal
centralism, the idea that law is the sole province of the state and its formal institutions.3Pluralists
sought to undermine the assumption of state power, discovering agency and subversive opportu-
nities among those presumed to be marginalized. As such, legal pluralism was a wayof critiquing
the power of the state and even at times celebrating resistance to state hegemony. Second, legal
pluralism often had an implicit pro-local bias, particularly in its emphasis on forms of resistance
1Some material in this review is derived from P. S. Berman, ‘Global Legal Pluralism as a NormativeProject’ (2018) 8
University of California Irvine Law Rev.149.
2For a brief history of some of the key legal pluralism literature,see generally for example P. S. Berman, ‘The New Legal
Pluralism’ (2009) 5 Annual Rev. of Law and Social Science 225; S. E. Merry,‘Legal Pluralism’ (1988) 22 Law & Society Rev.
869.
3For a critique of the ‘ideology of legal centralism’, see for example J. Griffiths, ‘What Is Legal Pluralism?’ (1986) 24 J. of
Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 1.
© 2023 The Author.Journal of Law and Society © 2023 Cardiff University Law School.
J. Law Soc. 2023;50:579–584. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jols 579
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