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45 Law & Soc. Inquiry 539 (2020)
Still Afraid of Legal Pluralism? Encountering Santi Romano

handle is hein.journals/lsociq45 and id is 548 raw text is: Law& Law & Social Inquiry Social Volume 45, Issue 2, 539-558, May 2020 Inquiry Review Symposium: Law and Society Meets Jurisprudence Still Afraid of Legal Pluralism? Encountering Santi Romano Roger Cotterrell ROMANO, SANTI. The Legal Order. 2nd ed. Translated by MARIANO CROCE. New York / Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017. The second edition of Santi Romano's book, The Legal Order, now appearing in its first English translation (2017), is a pioneer text of legal pluralism. Its interest lies in its extreme radicalism and in the fact that, although it is written by a lawyer, its argument has many important political implications and addresses core conceptual issues in contemporary socio- legal studies of legal pluralism. The social and political context of Romano's book in early twentieth-century Italy is far from being solely of historical interest. Issues that surrounded his juristic thinking in its time resonate with important political and social issues of today. INTRODUCTION Who's afraid of legal pluralism? asks an influential article (Benda-Beckmann 2002). The answer, it seems, is still-quite a lot of people. Lawyers especially, as well as some social scientists whose research interests are in law. Legal pluralism is variously defined as a situation in which two or more legal sys- tems coexist in the same social field (Merry 1988, 870); the coexistence of a plurality of different legal orders with links between them (Arnaud 1995, 150); or the state of affairs in which a category of social relations is within the field of operation of two or more bodies of legal norms (Woodman 1997, 157). But the term is not always used descriptively. It often indicates a normative problem: how to manage juristically a plu- rality of competing legal orders, systems, or bodies of law existing at the same time and in the same place but in radically unclear relation to each other. For lawyers the idea of legal pluralism can certainly be disturbing. It can suggest laws in unresolvable conflict or endless competition so that the question of what law should apply, and when, might no longer be answerable using orthodox legal method- ology. It can suggest legal insecurity, even chaos. And it can put in issue the often taken for granted idea that it is the state and no other institution that creates and controls law. The situation that legal pluralism suggests is one of possible conflict between legal systems or orders, or sets of legal rules or norms, each making independent claims to Roger Cotterrell is Anniversary Professor of Legal Theory, Queen Mary University of London, UK. He is grateful to Maksymilian Del Mar, Sally Engle Merry and Edoardo Fittipaldi for valuable comments on an earlier draft of this essay, r.b.m.cotterrell~gmul.ac.uk. © 2019 American Bar Foundation. 539

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