Legal Pluralism
Authors: Li Xinyue 
Published: June 2024

Legal pluralism is a construct, a means of understanding and imagining the world, both positively (as it is) and normatively (as it ought to be). Originating from critiques of legal centralism, legal pluralism refers to the complexity of law in a world where a single act or actor is potentially subject to multiple legal or quasi-legal regimes imposed by state, substate, transnational, international, and nonstate communities. After its inception in the 1960s, three major paradigms of legal pluralism as a scholarly discipline emerged at the intersection of legal philosophy, the sociology of law, and law and anthropology. “Classical legal pluralism” primarily concerns the recognition of customary, indigenous normative orders with colonial legal systems. Compared to the anthropology-rich, ethnology-informed classical legal pluralism, the “new legal pluralism” was established to investigate the multiplicity of normative interactions in social life across all national states, advancing legal sociology. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, entanglement among normative orders of human communities produced “global legal pluralism,” or, more precisely, “transnational legal and regulatory pluralism,” which formulates a pluralist vision for international law and global governance. With growing pluralistic approaches in the field of general jurisprudence and international law, legal pluralism has become an implication of the inexhaustible possibility of law, international legal order, and human society, leading to two main criticisms: the ambiguity of “what is law” under legal pluralism, and the negative assertion of “pluralism” as a product of disenchantment with universalism or as a disguise for relativism. Yet legal historians investigate the plurality in legal history, emphasizing different implications of legal pluralism from more law-oriented, history-informed perspectives. Additionally, as international legal scholars either actively engage with legal pluralism or subtly develop pluralism-informed scholarship to give account to international law in the face of emerging challenges, legal pluralism advances as a more or less borderless domain of inquiry of human construct that fundamentally shapes the ontology, epistemology, and perceptive that are of significant value for international law. This bibliography selectively focuses on these endeavors, sometimes reaching beyond explicit legal pluralism literature and eventually leaning toward the future in an effort to promote innovative, multidisciplinary dialogues on legal pluralism in the field of international law and its surroundings. This entry merely serves as an introduction to certain distinctive aspects of legal pluralism. An obstacle arose due to the intrinsically interdisciplinary nature of the work, resulting in the conceptual classification of its literature being somewhat arbitrary. More possibilities in discussing various strands of legal pluralism are therefore highly encouraged. Another challenge arose from the multi-language contributions made by researchers from throughout the globe. Non-English-language literature is only acknowledged to the extent that it is translated into English, with few exceptions. Omissions should therefore be understood as a limitation of the project rather than exclusions.