A pluralism of legal pluralisms

Legal pluralism, as a way of thinking about law, is the seemingly straightforward idea that there is a range of normative orders, which are independent from the state and can be properly described as legal without committing any conceptual mistake. Without giving a full survey of the long and varied history of legal pluralism theory, this article will discuss some central moments in that history. It will focus specifically on the question whether it is possible and useful to capture law as conceptually separate from other normative phenomena so as to speak of specifically legal pluralism or whether it is best to take a panlegalist approach and not draw any clear distinctions between law and other instances of social normativity.