Around the world, most states are faced with difficult issues arising out of cultural diversity in their territories. Within the legal field, such issues span across matters of private law through to public and constitutional law. At international level too there is now considerable jurisprudence regarding ethnic, religious and cultural diversity. In addition, there are several layers of legal control - from communal and religious regulation to state and international regulation. This multiplicity of norm setting has been variously termed legal pluralism, inter-legality or inter-normativity and provides a fascinating lens for academic analysis that links up to cultural diversity in new and interesting ways. The umbrella of cultural diversity encompasses various population groups throughout the world ranging from national, ethnic, religious or indigenous groupings. This series particularly welcomes work that is of comparative interest, concerning various state jurisdictions as well as different population groups.
By Pnina Werbner, Richard Werbner
September 25, 2023
This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of customary justice at a time when customary ...
By Cinzia Piciocchi
August 11, 2023
This book examines the everyday judicial experience in four multicultural jurisdictions as a means of exploring the relationship between legal systems and cultural identities. Increasing social heterogeneity has deeply affected legal systems as courts and parliaments must now deal with a growing ...
By Ilenia Ruggiu
June 30, 2020
How can jurists resolve multicultural conflicts? Which kind of questions should judges ask when culture enters the horizon of the law? Are they then called to become anthropologists? Through the analysis of hundreds of cases produced through decades of multicultural jurisprudence, this book ...
By Craig L. Carr, Lisa Johnson
July 19, 2018
American legal scholars have debated for some time the need for a cultural defense in criminal proceedings where minority cultural information seems perti nent to a finding of criminal responsibility in situations where a minority cultural defendant has violated a valid criminal statute. This work ...
Edited
By Lisbet Christoffersen, Jørgen S. Nielsen
November 16, 2016
This volume exposes some of the various issues raised in relation to Muslim communities in Europe by putting the intellectual and legal traditions into dialogue. It brings together a number of scholars of Shari’a and Islamic law with counterparts from the parallel European disciplines of ...
Edited
By Olaf Zenker, Markus Virgil Hoehne
February 07, 2018
Customary law and traditional authorities continue to play highly complex and contested roles in contemporary African states. Reversing the common preoccupation with studying the impact of the post/colonial state on customary regimes, this volume analyses how the interactions between state and ...
By Sindiso Mnisi Weeks
November 28, 2017
For most people in rural South Africa, traditional justice mechanisms provide the only feasible means of accessing any form of justice. These mechanisms are popularly associated with restorative justice, reconciliation and harmony in rural communities. Yet, this ethnographic study grounded in the ...
By Ralph Grillo
February 03, 2017
Contemporary European societies are multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, certainly in terms of the diversity which has stemmed from the immigration of workers and refugees and their settlement. Currently, however, there is widespread, often acrimonious, debate about ’other’ cultural and religious ...
By Ido Shahar
January 11, 2017
This book provides an unprecedented portrayal of a lively shari'a court in contemporary West Jerusalem, which belongs to the Israeli legal system but serves Palestinian residents of the eastern part of the city. It draws a rich picture of an intriguing institution, operating in an environment ...
By Kirsten Anker
January 09, 2017
This book takes up the postcolonial challenge for law and explains how the problems of legal recognition for Indigenous peoples are tied to an orthodox theory of law. Constructing a theory of legal pluralism that is both critical of law's epistemological and ontological presuppositions, as well as ...
Edited
By Ralph Grillo, Roger Ballard, Alessandro Ferrari, André J. Hoekema, Marcel Maussen, Prakash Shah
November 17, 2016
Legal Practice and Cultural Diversity considers how contemporary cultural and religious diversity challenges legal practice, how legal practice responds to that challenge, and how practice is changing in the encounter with the cultural diversity occasioned by large-scale, post-war immigration. ...
By Derya Bayir
November 28, 2016
Examining the on-going dilemma of the management of diversity in Turkey from a historical and legal perspective, this book argues that the state’s failure to accommodate ethno-religious diversity is attributable to the founding philosophy of Turkish nationalism and its heavy penetration into the ...