Editorial.

• Author: Shariff, Fauzia
• Position: Editorial

This special issue of LDG on 'Legal Pluralism and the nation state' aims to demonstrate the wide and varied application of the concept of legal pluralism to current socio-legal debates. The papers in the issue straddle topics as diverse as military law, religious courts in secular states and extraordinary rendition.

The concept of legal pluralism began life in the 1970s and 80s as a critique of the dominant legal centralist approach to legal theory that privileged state law over other empirically identifiable legal orders. The idea that law should be conceptualised beyond the state already had a long history when this term was phrased, most notably in the concept of 'living law' framed by Eugen Ehrilch in his book Grundlegung der Soziologie des Rechts 1913 (later translated as Fundament Principles of the Sociology of Law 1936). However, the term legal pluralism was not used until 1970 (Franz von Benda Beckman Rechtspluralismus in Malawi) and substantive papers on the subject appeared predominantly in the 1980s (Allott and Woodman 1985, Griffiths 1986, Merry 1986). Since this time there has been a growing body of theoretical and empirical writings on legal pluralism, most notably associated with the Journal of Legal Pluralism and the Commission on Legal Pluralism.

In its simplest and most cited form legal pluralism is defined as 'the presence in a social field of more than one legal order' (Griffiths 1986:1). But the definition of 'legal order' has been problematic (Roberts 2008) and the development of the concept of legal pluralism has been stunted by disagreements over where to draw the boundaries of law. Despite the ongoing debate on where to set the definitional boundaries of legal pluralism, the persuasive force of the concept in empirical and indeed theoretic explorations of modern dilemmas in socio-legal studies has meant that the term has endured and prospered. Today the term has been used in analysing an ever wider range of legal spheres.

This issue aims to contribute to this growing body of both theoretical and empirical writings in this important sub-field of law and anthropology. The topics covered in the issue demonstrate the wide relevance of a legal pluralist approach across issues of contemporary importance such as post-conflict reconstruction, enforcement of international human rights law and dilemmas for legal certainty in multicultural society.

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