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7 Socio-Legal Rev. 1 (2011)

handle is hein.journals/soclerev7 and id is 1 raw text is: Flying Kites in a Global Sky: New Models of Jurisprudence FLYING KITES IN A GLOBAL SKY: NEW MODELS OF JURISPRUDENCE Werner Menski* Taking a legaly pluralist stance which reflects global socio-legal reality, this article first identfies signficant mental blockagesjbr /egal scholars in theorising legal pluralism. It then argues that a socially responsibe approach to law teaching, not only in India, cannot ignore society, culture and competing value systems. If /aw is everywhere dynamic and internally plural, even if not immediatey visible, acknowledging pluralisms becomes necessarily a highly dynamic activity, comparable to the challenges of kitefying. One wrong move, and the subtle structure crashes. Unless /aw teaching takes p/ura/ism serouy, legal education will empower only a fiw privileged actors, capable to manipulate law and its multiple power-related uses. Socially conscious approaches to law teaching must problematise that while we need law to avoid chaos, eveywhere it risks constant exploitation and misappropriation. Improved teaching about /egalpluralism and choice making in Indian law schools offers hope, but manj challenges remain. I. THE PERILS OF DEFICIENT THEORISING........................................1 II. TEACHING LAW AS A SOCIALLY RELEVANT AND PLULTLITY-SENSITIVE SUBJECT.......6 III. INTRODUCING THE KITE MODEL OF LAW AS A TOOL TO PROPEL EXCELLENCE.....13 IV. CONCLUSIONS.............................................................20 I. THE PERILS OF DEFICIENT THEORISING Writing on the interface between law and society faces major irritations, to put it mildly, if one wants to approach this subject from a legal perspective. There is simply no agreed global understanding on what is meant by law,' not to speak here of society and 'culture'. Law is all around us, and a recent study suggests rightly that law is everywhere ubiquitous.2 Lawyers, however, continue to waste much energy on defining law, instead of acknowledging that the internally plural phenomenon of law has everywhere fuzzy boundaries and manifests itself in * Prof. Werner Menski (NI.A., Ph.D., Professor of South Asian Laws at the School of Law, S.O.A.S., University of London) has authored several books and many articles on Hindu and South Asian laws and also works on intercultural human rights in relation to ethnic minorities. In addition, strongly based on teaching, he has developed new work on comparative law and global legal theory, which seeks to push the boundaries of post-modern conceptualisations of law. The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Vineeth Mathoor (B.A., M.A., M.Phil.), a historian from J.N.U., New Delhi, with a special interest in law. WERNER NIENSKI, COMPARATIVE LAW IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT: THE LEGAL SYSTENIS OF ASIA AND AFRICA 34 (2006). See also Brian Z. Tamanaha, Law, in THE OXFORD INTERNATIONAL ENCYCLOPAE DIA OF LEG AL HISTORY: VOL. IV 17 (S.N. Katz ed., 2009), who reports that despite continuous conversations about the nature of law since the ancient Greeks, and probably before, theorists have not been able to agree on how to define or conceptualize law. 2 EMM ANUEL NIELISSARIS, UBIQUITOUS LAw (2009). 1

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