What Can We Mean by Legal Pluralism? A Socio-philosophical Perspective

Sec. 1 delves into some of the main questions and claims raised by Legal Pluralists. Sec. 2 advances the suspicion that, in trying to oppose state legal centralism, Legal Pluralism has uncritically assumed most of the presuppositions of its opponent, i.e. of mainstream legal positivism, and thus has hampered its own original task to reverse them. From this perspective, which tries to encompass the claim- and project-use of law, sec. 3 contends that the question “What is law?” should be changed into the different question “Why have people invented and constantly transformed something that they have called/recognized as law?”, so as to conceive law as a problem-solving process and a discursive resource. The subsequent sections provide a portrayal of law (or better, iurisdictio) as a social sphere, which allows the expansion/potentiation of society, and insist on the relevance of the why-question vis-à-vis ought-questions about law.