Legal Pluralism: Conflicting Legal Commitments Without a Neutral Arbiter

This essay suggests some promising fields for legal anthropological studies in matters of legal pluralism and discuss some key concepts related to the latter. My focus is on the crisscrossing of normative appeals issuing from state law, international and transnational rules and a great variety of non-state community based normative commitments, where there is no generally recognized, neutral arbiter to settle the conflicts between all these normative orders. My attention goes predominantly to what people belonging to distinct communities have to gain or lose from a situation of legal pluralism, both at the national and the international or transnational level. I then explore the mutual interpenetration of bodies of norms, or rather, the phenomenon of interlegality. Stress is laid on international but particularly transnational law beyond the state borders, and on the conflicts between these norms among themselves and with national and local law. In this framework, I raise the question of whether this situation deserves to be called “global legal pluralism” and what that means. Finally I deal with legal pluralism in policies of land tenure legalization as well as with the “state (law) legal pluralism”, that is, legal pluralism within state law.