Culture in the Domains of Law

This book examines whether law, as a cultural practice, can apply across cultural boundaries to bind people with vastly different beliefs and practices.

This book examines and answers the following question - can law, as a cultural practice, apply across cultural boundaries to bind people with vastly different beliefs and practices? The challenge for law is to maintain coherence while at the same time being attuned to the lived reality of people in different places, with different beliefs, engaged in different practices.What does it mean for courts and other legal institutions to be culturally sensitive? What are the institutional implications and consequences of such an aspiration? To what extent is legal discourse capable of accommodating multiple cultural narratives without losing its claim to normative specificity? And how are we to understand meetings of law and culture in the context of formal and informal legal processes, when demands are made to accommodate cultural difference? The encounter of law and culture is a polycentric relation, but these questions draw our attention to law and legal institutions as one site of encounter warranting further investigation, to map out the place of culture in the domains of law by relying on the insights of law, anthropology, politics, and philosophy. Culture in the Domains of Law seeks to examine and answer these questions, resulting in a richer outlook on both law and culture.