Mac Amhlaigh on Pluralism & Legal Theory

Cormac S. Mac Amhlaigh (University of Edinburgh – School of Law) has posted Does Legal Theory Have a Pluralism Problem? (Schiff Berman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Legal Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2019)) on SSRN.  Here is the abstract: Legal theory has been criticised by legal pluralists on the grounds that it has a ‘pluralism problem’. In a nutshell, legal theory’s pluralism problem stems from the fact that it explicitly or implicitly assumes the model of state law whenever it refers to law. This is problematic both because such a state-based conception of law fails to capture myriad non-state forms of law existing in different contexts and because it supports oppression in post-colonial contexts where indigenous laws are pushed out by colonial laws conforming to the (state-based) legal theoretical paradigm. This paper focuses on the former, analytical, limb of legal theory’s pluralism problem by breaking the problem down into…

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