Commission on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism
Theme for Academic Sessions

Legal Pluralist Perspectives on Humanity, Development and Cultural Diversity

In dealing with the impact of globalisation and transnational forms of law, the attention of a growing number of state institutions, policy makers, scholars and international organizations has focused on how law operates in a variety of settings. For current social, economic and political changes across the globe are manifested in vastly increased flows of commodities, people, capital, technologies, images and knowledge across local, regional and national frontiers.  Attempts to monitor and regulate these changes make it necessary to reappraise the ways in which legal pluralism works and the forms that it adopts. In its session the Commission will explore this issue from the perspective of studies of non-state and state laws and of the relationships which are possible between different laws in circumstances of legal pluralism.  It will also focus on the many different ways in which laws operate and are utilised by social actors in these new circumstances. It will address the different ways in which discourses about rights and obligations are adopted by different constituencies and how local concerns shape the ways in which universal legal categories of rights are being implemented, resisted and transformed as well as reformulated in these processes.  In examining these issues the Commission’s Session will highlight 1) the operation and effects of legal pluralism at a variety of levels; 2) the ways in which states regulate and respond to pluralism and its impact on communities and social actors; and 3) how other normative orders are invoked in response to processes of globalisation by various bodies such as indigenous people, minorities, non-governmental organisations and individuals. Topics for discussion may comprise, but need not be limited to, the role of international law, (including human rights) as well as the management of natural resources, gender issues, law, governance and legal pluralism, law, theory and justice, and the legal regulation of biogenetics.

Paper Proposals