With the advent of legal modernity across the Asian landscape and the establishment of some form of secularism in almost every Asian country,

it became inescapably apparent that state law in contemporary societies always operates in relation to multiple normative systems that structure human interactions, resolve disputes, determine statuses and relationships, and punish wrongdoing.

The state sometimes recognizes, authorizes, or even defers to non-state normative systems; but at other times such systems operate without any acknowledgment by the state. Because the official legal system does not provide a reliable indicator of the existence of non-state legal arrangements, it becomes the task of the law and society scholar to investigate the role and influence of these multiple normative systems from a perspective apart from - or in addition to - that of the state's legal actors and agencies. This undertak­ing has been called the study of “legal pluralism,” and it is one of the oldest and most deeply rooted fields of Asian law and society scholarship.

Legal pluralism “is generally defined as a situation in which two or more legal systems coexist in the same social field” (Merry 1988:870). Legal plural­ism scholars study the law of the modern state in relation to many other kinds of normative systems that interact with one another and with state law in a given social space. These include religious law, village or community laws, various forms of “customary” ordering, the internal regulatory systems of

companies or other organizations, and the interactional laws that arise from repeated dealings among the same parties over time. Although most legal pluralism scholars use the term “law” broadly to describe a plethora of non­state normative systems, some critics have argued for a narrower definition of “law” and “legal.” If norms are unwritten, unrecognized by the state, and enforceable only by social sanctions such as shunning or retaliation, these critics ask, Do they really deserve to be called law (e.g., Roberts 1998)? Are table manners a form of law?

While such definitional issues may be of great importance for legal philoso­phers, they are not an overriding concern of the majority of legal pluralism scholars, whose aim is to document and analyze actual human behavior in complex, multilayered social contexts.

The structure of the South-East Asian legal systems is pluralistic in nature. The municipal laws of the colonial powers, and now those of their successor states in South-EastAsia, claim an absolute monopoly of source of law, legal machinery, and political support within the nation-state. A consequence of this is that laws may be valid on two levels; if the state insists, as it must, upon its absolute right to determine what is law through the machinery of the municipal law system, then only those laws so determined are prescriptively validated. A breach of valid prescription requires the application of sanction. In municipal law this is the standard way of working and it operates perfectly well in the homelands of South-East Asia's European laws, but it does not work so well in South-East Asia itself because large sections of the population do not know the contents of municipal law or, if they do, choose to regard them as not binding. They prefer the traditional status-type laws which have a descriptive validity. Whether or not one wishes to accept that informal law is �law properly so called' is really beside the point; such laws actually do determine personal obligation, in some cases to the extent that municipal-law institutions, such as local courts, are forced to take account of them. The result is at best an internal conflict of principle or, at worst, a complete disregard by the population for the formally valid law.

What was true of colonialism and legal pluralism in Southeast Asia was equally true of colonial regimes elsewhere in the world.

[They] blended the purported preservation of the status quo with a broader vision of institutional and social change. On the one hand, they claimed to have maintained nearly intact the core of indigenous judicial institutions ruling according to sharia, which were presided over by qadis (Muslim judges); on the other, they effectively reformed the procedure of appointment to the position of judge by establishing a system of popular elections: where qadis had once been designated by the head of a Muslim principality, “native judges” (narodnye sud'i) were, under Russian rule, to be chosen by voting representa­tives of local communities. Furthermore, Russians restricted severely the juris­diction of Islamic law courts, thus removing, for instance, murder cases and highway robbery from their purview.

These new arrangements in colonial Central Asia led to an openly pluralistic legal world in which, according to Sartori, both Muslim law and Russian law were maintained but altered through their interactions with one another.

Scholarship on legal pluralism takes at least two forms. The first is what Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (200r, cited in Benda-Beckmann and Turner 2018:263) has called a “legal political” conception of legal pluralism, which focuses on the “recognition of one legal system by another legal system - usually that of the nation state.” For example, Hooker (1975:464-6) himself explored the quite different ways in which French, Dutch, and English colonial governments recognized the multiplicity of normative orders over which they asserted their authority:

[T]he French version of civil law could not admit the coexistence of another legal system within the same politically determined boundary, unless, by an act of the French state, such a system was acknowledged to exist.

In this first type of legal pluralism scholarship, researchers aim to document and analyze the approaches taken by “modern” states as they attempt to operate their justice systems in socially and culturally complex environments.

A second type of legal pluralism scholarship proceeds inductively, as scholars describe what they see “on the ground” when they observe human conduct in a variety of social fields. Based on their observations, these scholars construct empirically based theories about the normative orders that actually shape behavior - their interaction with one another and their interaction with state law. As Janine Ubink (2018:141) has observed, this second approach to legal pluralism is “a response to legal centralist ideology that law is and should be the law of the state and that other normative orderings are hierarchically subordinate to state law.” The aim of these scholars, as Hooker would put it, is descriptive rather than prescriptive, and their stance toward state law is agnos­tic and often skeptical with respect to its claims of authority and exclusivity.