In The Oxford Handbook of Global Legal Pluralism , Paul Schiff Berman, the Walter S. Cox Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School, takes on the capacious concept and theory of global legal pluralism from a new direction. Having authored a monograph and law review articles that sketch out the descriptive and normative stakes of the field, Berman now brings together an impressive group of authors to wrestle with the expanse that is global legal pluralism.Footnote ¹ At its best, the book offers fresh insight into the field by identifying thorny problems at its center and offering creative paths forward. At times, and perhaps fittingly for a book on pluralism, the multiplicity of voices can make for a discordant conversation. While Berman offers a helpful set of methodological and theoretical parameters, as an endeavor that celebrates a multiplicity of voices and substantive contestation, a book on global legal pluralism should hardly be expected to present a unitary perspective on the field. Sally Engle Merry explains that a legal pluralist frame reveals law to be “fragmented, inconsistent, and contradictory,” offering the possibility of greater attunement to the local while at the same time risking increased oppression of the marginalized.Footnote ² This volume presents examinations of each of these dimensions, which are equally applicable to global legal pluralism itself, in a variety of different registers.

The edited volume begins with Berman's thorough and careful explanation of the concept of global legal pluralism as he has defined it in his previous work. Many of the chapters also offer an exploration of global legal pluralism's key moves, which helps to get one's arms around the term and the theory. Global legal pluralism aims to decenter the state;Footnote ³ this “critique of state centeredness is meant to render visible the many normative universes of which the ones we associate with ‘the state’ are only a part.”Footnote ⁴ It expands the set of law-producing actors, as well as sources of law, deemed worthy of study.Footnote ⁵ Global legal pluralism also adds an interactive dimension to the analysis, recognizing that laws overlap and influence each other.Footnote ⁶ At least some contributors recognize the importance of a praxis element, highlighting the impossibility of “a final philosophical formulation of principles of justice . . . apart from the actual practice of politics and law.”Footnote ⁷

The edited volume is well structured to analyze these dimensions of global legal pluralism. After Berman's conceptual introduction, a historical overview, and a section on theory, the book focuses on specific cases that highlight several of the key conceptual moves in legal pluralist thought. Sections on constitutionalism and international law challenge sovereign-centric conceptions of law and demonstrate the work that global legal pluralism can do in expanding our recognition of legal authority beyond the unitary state. In sections focused on conflicts of law and commercial law, the volume examines the ways in which legal systems can incorporate a range of sources of law. And in sections examining the situation of Indigenous peoples, religious law, and the deterritorialization of data, the book offers examples of the influence of non-state actors over law, from multinational corporations to Iraqi tribal elders. The volume ends with a section that engages with questions of membership in norm-generating communities beyond the state through the study of citizenship.

The contributions to the volume lay out in detail the substantial benefits of global legal pluralism, both theoretically and in practice. The inclusiveness of the approach enhances the legitimacy of the relevant legal process, which makes it more likely to be effective.Footnote ⁸ Monica Hakimi makes the compelling argument that constructive conflict is good for the political community, creating bonds that undergird the social order.Footnote ⁹ Ayelet Shachar highlights the ability of global legal pluralism to recognize multiple affiliations, which can enable a legal system to uphold the values of diversity and equality in decisions around who belongs to the community.Footnote ¹⁰ Horatia Muir Watt describes the method's promise of injecting “hybrid normative interactions with tolerance and mutual accommodation . . . and ensur[ing] accountability in the global decision-making processes through deliberation, contestation, and recognition.”Footnote ¹¹

Yet, as Carol Weisbrod notes, we are still “left with considerable uncertainty as to what subjects are included within the idea [of] global legal pluralism,”Footnote ¹² and at times the suspicion that the content of pluralism is something of a Rorschach test. Berman offers a useful explanation of the descriptive component of global legal pluralism, explaining that it “offers a more complicated descriptive account of the interaction of normative systems, the strategic actions of individuals and groups in deploying these multiple systems to pursue their interests, and the subtle processes by which even norms without coercive power can change legal consciousness and have impact over time.”Footnote ¹³ There is also of course a normative component, global legal pluralism as theory, which he describes as “simultaneously to celebrate both local variation and international order, recognizing the importance of preserving both multiple sites for contestation and an interlocking system of reciprocity and exchange.”Footnote ¹⁴ This relatively clean framework soon becomes complex and at times muddled, when we learn that “[h]eteronormativity is invoked as a form of legal pluralism”Footnote ¹⁵ and that the “inherently pluralist nature [of international criminal law] might be thought to hamper judicial dialogue though it might also foster it.”Footnote ¹⁶ In a more positive vein, Kirsty Gover offers insight into the descriptive method of global legal pluralism as encouraging attentiveness to forms of law, such as Indigenous law, that are often overlooked.Footnote ¹⁷ In a particularly pithy explanation of the normative theory, Erin Ryan explains that “legal pluralists are calling for a non-zero-sum normative world.”Footnote ¹⁸

Berman welcomes and engages with much of this uncertainty, including the question of whether global legal pluralism is a descriptive method, a normative theory, or something else altogether. On the descriptive side, he explains that global legal pluralism offers a richer account of the operation of law in particular by demonstrating the ways in which law shapes perception. Berman describes global legal pluralism's key insight as the impossibility of decreeing universal acceptance of authority; instead, law must work through a process of contestation and accommodation.Footnote ¹⁹ Sally Engle Merry explains that legal pluralism helps to understand the complexity of the relationships among and interactions between different forms of law,Footnote ²⁰ and Peer Zumbansen adds that it should examine conflicts over the content norms and their socioeconomic and political roots.Footnote ²¹

On the normative side, Berman points to the need for procedures to manage diversity without collapsing into universality, and identifies participatory and dialogic values as underlying his take on global legal pluralism.Footnote ²² These are compelling points, yet as Frédéric Mégret notes, the risk of straddling the line between descriptive and prescriptive is that the descriptive contains a subtle undercurrent of normativity, potentially obscuring the shortcomings of the theory.Footnote ²³ While Berman engages ably with some critiques of the theory, there are at least two points that would have benefited from more attention. The first is the risk of tribalism and authoritarian populism; though mentioned in Berman's introduction,Footnote ²⁴ none of the chapters discussed in depth the problem of accommodating norms that are unapologetically racist or misogynist despite the very real contemporary challenges posed by such norms. Second, while some of the chapters detail the problematic history of legal pluralism and colonialism, the risks of global legal pluralism, unconstrained as it is by an independent prescriptive moral theory,Footnote ²⁵ remained relatively underexplored.

Berman also responds thoughtfully to the question of how much space there is between global legal pluralism and liberalism.Footnote ²⁶ In contrast to liberalism, which rests on a substantive commitment to individual rights, as a process-based theory, global legal pluralism needs an undergirding normative component to avoid dissolution into relativism. Berman makes a strong case for participatory and dialogic values as this backstop principle.Footnote ²⁷ The chapters also carefully explore some of the challenges in implementing global legal pluralism in practice. Elena Baylis describes hybrid courts as a pluralist production, but explains the ways in which many fall short of becoming cosmopolitan pluralist engagements.Footnote ²⁸ Michael Coyle describes the challenges of improving the mechanisms through which state and Indigenous norms interact,Footnote ²⁹ and Michael Helfand highlights the tensions between procedural fairness and community pressure in religious arbitration.Footnote ³⁰ Peter Spiro engages with thorny questions around the parameters for membership determination, asking who is part of the community and who decides.Footnote ³¹ These and other critical perspectives enrich the volume and our understanding of the praxis of global legal pluralism.

The volume also engages with some of the uglier portions of legal pluralism's history, though it might have gone further in extending those lessons into the current day. Though the limited normative content of global legal pluralism offers much promise, it also presents deep challenges, including the risk of being deployed in the service of strategic blindness to and/or obscuring of law's contradictions. Nicole Roughan begins her chapter with the apt quotation that, “authority has a waxen nose that can be bent in different ways.”Footnote ³² Lauren Benton offers the sharper critique that global legal pluralism's future efforts to create procedural mechanisms “might be tempered by caution informed by the past efforts of empires to design and adjust plural legal orders.”Footnote ³³ Her chapter presents a cautionary tale of imperial legal politics and the history of international law; in a similar vein, Grégoire Mallard describes global legal pluralist theory, “at least in France, [as] still is the victim of its historical ties to colonial subjugation.”Footnote ³⁴ Yet the volume does not connect this “normative dark side,” as Frédéric Mégret describes it, that risks “ominous underlying projects of power and domination” to the very real contemporary risks of xenophobic nationalist politics.Footnote ³⁵ Is global legal pluralism capable of turning these enemies into adversaries, and if so, how might it attempt to do so?Footnote ³⁶

Another vexing question that the volume engages is whether the field of global legal pluralism is truly global—a concern that pervades international legal theory more broadly. The promise of global legal pluralism is its ability to offer a viable alternative to universalist approaches to international law, one that celebrates local variation.Footnote ³⁷ Yet as Cormac Mac Amhlaigh describes in more detail, the debate in which global legal pluralism is engaged is set on an Anglo-American stage.Footnote ³⁸ Mac Amlaigh offers William Twining's critique of legal theory as focused on the law of Western states, overlooking a range of non-state law and legal orders throughout the world.Footnote ³⁹ In order to engage seriously with the latter oversight, the participation of academics from the Global South is crucial to ensuring a legitimately global epistemology. In terms of perspectives presented in the volume, Berman has been attentive to gender balance in the selection of authors, but those scholars are deeply rooted in North America, Europe, and Australia, with Hong Kong and Singapore making an appearance. There is more work to be done by global legal pluralists to expand the range of scholarly perspectives contributing to international legal theory.

Yet global legal pluralism pushes even further, looking beyond the state for law and beyond academics and lawyers in identifying, assessing, and developing legal authority. The question at the heart of the book is whether global pluralism can be “legal.” The step away from state law opens up tremendous promise, yet its very capaciousness presents a thorny set of problems. Global legal pluralism examines authority rather than state-issued law, which means that law is everywhere, and there are no sharp lines between law and non-legal regimes.Footnote ⁴⁰ The volume engages with many interesting questions, such as how nonstate law can develop systemic autonomy, and offers creative responses, such as focusing on network density and intensity.Footnote ⁴¹ The turn toward local voices presents even more fundamental challenges, including whether the concept of law itself is an imposition. The chapters focusing on Indigenous communities are particularly pertinent to these questions; Michael Coyle describes Indigenous law as focused on harmony and often located in collective and implied values, and Kirsty Gover explains that Indigenous societies view law as indistinct from moral, ethical, and cosmological orders, and identify “the land as the source and repository of law.”Footnote ⁴² These perspectives raise the question of whether global pluralism's conception of the legal is fundamentally at odds with the goal of serious engagement with local and non-state perspectives. As Coyle notes, legal pluralism's authors may be best situated to speak to state actors who interact with Indigenous peoples,Footnote ⁴³ which might be useful in designing mechanisms to enhance Indigenous self-determination, but does not span the full distance to a robust instantiation of global pluralism.

Global legal pluralism's broad interdisciplinarity undergirds the field but also poses challenges of analytical coherence. Originating in anthropology and expounded by legal scholars, the concept of global legal pluralism has entered the academic conversation in economics, history, political science, and sociology.Footnote ⁴⁴ Though scholarly discourse on global legal pluralism by definition should include many voices, Carol Weisbrod raises the concern that the different disciplines are talking across each other rather than engaging in cross-fertilization.Footnote ⁴⁵ She asks whether global legal pluralism is constituted by separate conversations in different disciplines rather than one inclusive discourse. Sanne Taekema notes that while there is convergence in acknowledgement of global legal pluralism, there is divergence across disciplines in the normative and theoretical accounts of what the concept actually means.Footnote ⁴⁶ Several authors ask whether global legal pluralism is simply a new label for existing theoretical approaches, noting its similarities to fragmentation and cosmopolitan theory, and highlighting connections with theories of legal transplants and legal borrowing as well as global constitutionalism.Footnote ⁴⁷ Ralf Michaels identifies a related oversight in the conversation—that global legal pluralism ignores conflicts of laws as a discipline, which is a problem, in his view, as the former lacks the precision of the latter.Footnote ⁴⁸ Whether or not the reader is persuaded by Michaels's arguments, his chapter makes the underlying challenge faced by global legal pluralism of herding cats of many stripes into one cohesive and inclusive conversation.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the abundant challenges with which it grapples, this edited volume offers much food for thought, not only for those who would situate themselves within the global legal pluralist camp, but for scholars of international law more broadly. Berman has engaged a broad range of perspectives—descriptions, critiques, paths forward—on global legal pluralism, and the contributors have pushed against existing boundaries in international legal scholarship in a variety of interesting and productive ways. Though such an ambitious and capacious conversation might not always lead to harmonious and cohesive discourse, even its discordant notes provide insights as to the role legal scholars might play in moving the discipline of international law in more global, pluralist, and potentially emancipatory direction.