From Limited Realism to Plural Law. Normative Approach versus Cultural Perspective

Soft law, alternatives, informal conflict settlement procedures, are all the daily fare of legal sociologists who accept pluralism as part and parcel of the legal scene. Not so legal dogmatics, however, whose legal experts are still loath to think in terms of legal pluralism. For legal dogmatics, the "modern" theory of the State and its legal system—a theory forming the plinth of our Western concept of laws and rights—is founded on a pyramidal structure of legal norms and the exclusive validity of the laws created by the State. As a result, no given social system can formally allow several legal norms proposing different interpretations of the same matter to exist at the same time. In our "monocentrist" Western tradition of law and the State, pluralism is in oddity, an anachronism.