This section illustrates how some scholars explain litigation choices by situating courts in the broader context of dispute institutions in society.

As we have seen in Chapter 2, studies of legal pluralism played an exception­ally important role in shaping law and society as a field. Pluralism scholars have demonstrated that every society contains multiple, overlapping systems of law and legality to deal with issues such as land and property, marriage, violence, inheritance, and the like.

Consider, for example, an influential article by one of the leading scholars of legal pluralism, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann. Writing in 1981 about legal pluralism in a Minangkabau village in West Sumatra, Indonesia, von Benda-Beckmann carefully describes a multitude of insti­tutions with overlapping “jurisdictions” that were available to villagers in the region where she conducted her fieldwork. Some of them “derive their legitimation from adat, the indigenous Minangkabau system of normative rules and usages, others from the national - formerly colonial - legal system.” In von Benda-Beckmann's analysis, these plural legal systems became active through the choices made by villagers to “forum shop” their disputes to the institutions most likely to favor their claims. By the same token, she points out that the institutions associated with each of the plural legal systems also engaged in an analogous type of “shopping” for particular kinds of disputes that they could acquire and process to further their own political interests. In this richly detailed description, von Benda-Beckmann shows that the movement of disputes - whether “pushed” by the disputants or “pulled” by the fora themselves - is the dynamic force underlying legal pluralism in Minangkabau.

3.2