Culture in the Domains of Law

This book examines whether law, as a cultural practice, can apply across cultural boundaries to bind people with vastly different beliefs and practices.

René Provost (Edited by)

9781107163331, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 February 2017

467 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 3 cm, 0.8 kg

What does it mean for courts and other legal institutions to be culturally sensitive? What are the institutional implications and consequences of such an aspiration? To what extent is legal discourse capable of accommodating multiple cultural narratives without losing its claim to normative specificity? And how are we to understand meetings of law and culture in the context of formal and informal legal processes, when demands are made to accommodate cultural difference? The encounter of law and culture is a polycentric relation, but these questions draw our attention to law and legal institutions as one site of encounter warranting further investigation, to map out the place of culture in the domains of law by relying on the insights of law, anthropology, politics, and philosophy. Culture in the Domains of Law seeks to examine and answer these questions, resulting in a richer outlook on both law and culture.

1. Centaur jurisprudence - culture before the law René Provost
Part I. Accommodation of Minority Cultural Practices: 2. Legal pluralism and the interpretive limits of law Anthony Connolly
3. Family law, state recognition and intersecting spheres/spaces: Jewish and Muslim women divorcing in the UK Pascale Fournier
4. Customary norms vs state law. French courts' responses to the traditional practice of excision Lucia Bellucci
Part II. Aboriginal Law: 5. Law, culture, fact in indigenous claims: legal pluralism as a problem of recognition Kirsten Anker
6. On perpetuity: tradition, law, and the pluralism of Hopi jurisprudence Justin Richland
7. Existing in the hyphen: on relational legal culture Jen Hendry
8. The unexpected effects of the recognition of indigenous rights in New Caledonia: the story of an assimilation measure becoming the trigger for the acculturation of the French legal system Thomas Burelli and Régis Lafargue
Part III. Alternative Dispute Resolution: 9. Cultures of conflict: welcoming and resisting 'non-Western' influence in alternative dispute resolution Eric Reiter
10. Rebalancing power and culture: the case of alternative dispute resolution Morgan Brigg
11. Grassroots law in context: moving beyond the cultural justification Kristin Doughty
Part IV. Law in Conflicts: 12. Cannibal laws René Provost
13. Beyond the paradox of exporting the rule of law: resilience and the war on drugs in the Americas David Chandler.

Subject Areas: Law & society [LAQ], Social groups [JFS], Cultural studies [JFC]