Rethinking Legal Pluralism: Local Law and State Law in the Evolution of Water Property Rights in Northwestern Spain

Abstract

In recent years, approaches to legal pluralism have shifted dramatically. One shift comes from within a school of fieldwork-oriented anthropologists, historians, and sociologists known as the law-and-society movement.The Law and Society Review, and to a lesser extent, Law and Social Inquiry, are the main outlets of the movement. Studies of legal pluralism are published in these journals and increasingly so, since its founding in 1981, in the Journal of Legal Pluralism. Before the turn, law-and-society scholars viewed local, national, and transnational legal systems as coexisting but essentially separate. Criticisms of the inherent stasis of this formulation and its failure to explore interactions between the systems or power inequalities among them motivated the shift (Griffiths 1986; Starr and Collier 1994; Merry 1988, 1992). The new legal pluralism, as it is called, now includes an expanded range of normative ordering systems, often labeled private governance, found in all societies, not only those with colonial histories but also those produced by transnational processes (Galanter 1981; Merry 1992). It addresses the dialectic, mutually constitutive relations of these systems rather than their separateness (Arthurs 1985; Benda-Beckman andStrijbosch 1986; Fitzpatrick 1983; Henry 1985; Vanderlinden 1989).

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