Normative Pluralism

The complex legal situations arising from the coexistence of international law, state law, and social and religious norms in different parts of the world often include scenarios of conflict between them. These conflicting norms issued from different categories of ‘laws’ result in difficulties in describing, identifying and analysing human rights in plural environments. This volume studies how normative conflicts unfold when trapped in the aspirations of human rights and their local realizations. It reflects on how such tensions can be eased, while observing how and why they occur. The authors examine how obedience or resistance to the official law is generated through the interaction of a multiplicity of conflicting norms, interpretations and practices. Emphasis is placed on the actors involved in raising or decreasing the tension surrounding the conflict and the implications that the conflict carries, whether resolved or not, in conditions of asymmetric power movements. It is argued that legal responsiveness to state law depends on how people with different identities deal with it, narrate it and build expectations from it, bearing in mind that normative pluralism may also operate as an instrument towards the exclusion of certain communities from the public sphere. The chapters look particularly to expose the dialogue between parallel normative spheres in order for law to become more effective, while investigating the types of socio-legal variables that affect the functioning of law, leading to conflicts between rights, values and entire cultural frames.

This book addresses conflicts involving different normative orders: what happens when international law prohibits behavior, but the same behavior is nonetheless morally justified or warranted? Can the actor concerned ignore international law under appeal to morality? Can soldiers escape legal liability by pointing to honor? Can accountants do so under reference to professional standards? How, in other words, does law relate to other normative orders? The assumption behind this book is that law no longer automatically claims supremacy, but that actors can pick and choose which code to follow. The novelty resides not so much in identifying conflicts, but in exploring if, when and how different orders can be used intentionally. In doing so, the book covers conflicts between legal orders and conflicts involving law and honor, self-regulation, lex mercatoria, local social practices, bureaucracy, religion, professional standards and morality.

The potential conflicts between morality and self-interest lie at the heart of ethics. These conflicts arise because both moral and prudential considerations apply to our choices. A widespread assumption in philosophical ethics is that by weighing moral and prudential reasons against each other, we can compare their relative weights and determine what we ought to do in the face of such conflicts. While this assumption might seem innocuous and fruitful, a closer examination suggests that it lacks both justification and the necessary content that would allow it to do the normative work it promises. In this book, Mathea Slåttholm Sagdahl grapples with these cases of conflict, but argues that there may be no simple answer to the question of what we ought to do all things considered. Sagdahl argues against the assumption of comparability and defends an alternative pluralist theory of normativity where morality and prudence form two separate and incommensurable normative standpoints, much like in Henry Sidgwick's "Dualism of Practical Reason." This type of view has tended to be quickly dismissed by its opponents, but Sagdahl argues that the theory is in fact a well-motivated theory of normativity and that the typical objections that tend to target it are much weaker than they are usually thought to be.

This book is devoted to the study of the interplay between religious rules and State law. It explores how State recognition of religious rules can affect the degree of legal diversity that is available to citizens and why such recognition sometime results in more individual and collective freedom and sometime in a threat to equality of citizens before the law. The first part of the book contains a few contributions that place this discussion within the wider debate on legal pluralism. While State law and religious rules are two normative systems among many others, the specific characteristics of the latter are at the heart of tensions that emerge with increasing frequency in many countries. The second part is devoted to the analysis of about twenty national cases that provide an overview of the different tools and strategies that are employed to manage the relationship between State law and religious rules all over the world.

This book provides a theoretical framework for explaining the choices made by international decision-makers in terms of what constitutes law. It comprehensively analyzes the practice of human rights courts in applying legal instruments outside their competence and proposes that this practice recognizes that different normative instruments coexist in an un-ordered space, and that meaning can be produced by the free interaction of those instruments around a problem. Based on this, the book advances its normative plurality hypothesis, which states that decision-makers must survey the acquis of international law in order to identify all the instruments containing relevant normative information for a particular situation. The set of rules of law applicable to the situation must then be complemented with other instruments containing specific normative information relevant to the situation, resulting in a complete system of norms advancing a common purpose.

"Abstract Global legal pluralism has become one of the leading analytical frameworks for understanding and conceptualizing law in the twenty-first century"--

This book addresses conflicts involving how law relates normative orders. The assumption behind the book is that law no longer automatically claims supremacy, but that actors can pick and choose which code to follow. The book covers conflicts between legal orders and conflicts involving law and honor, self-regulation, lex mercatoria, local social practices, bureaucracy, religion, professional standards, and morality.

This collection of essays interrogates how human rights law and practice acquire meaning in relation to legal pluralism, ie, the co-existence of more than one regulatory order in a same social field. As a social phenomenon, legal pluralism exists in all societies. As a legal construction, it is characteristic of particular regions, such as post-colonial contexts. Drawing on experiences from Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, the contributions in this volume analyse how different configurations of legal pluralism interplay with the legal and the social life of human rights. At the same time, they enquire into how human rights law and practice influence interactions that are subject to regulation by more than one normative regime. Aware of numerous misunderstandings and of the mutual suspicion that tends to exist between human rights scholars and anthropologists, the volume includes contributions from experts in both disciplines and intends to build bridges between normative and empirical theory.