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This book examines whether law, as a cultural practice, can apply across cultural boundaries to bind people with vastly different beliefs and practices.
List of contents
1. Centaur jurisprudence - culture before the law René Provost; Part I. Accommodation of Minority Cultural Practices: 2. Legal pluralism and the interpretive limits of law Anthony Connolly; 3. Family law, state recognition and intersecting spheres/spaces: Jewish and Muslim women divorcing in the UK Pascale Fournier; 4. Customary norms vs state law. French courts' responses to the traditional practice of excision Lucia Bellucci; Part II. Aboriginal Law: 5. Law, culture, fact in indigenous claims: legal pluralism as a problem of recognition Kirsten Anker; 6. On perpetuity: tradition, law, and the pluralism of Hopi jurisprudence Justin Richland; 7. Existing in the hyphen: on relational legal culture Jen Hendry; 8. The unexpected effects of the recognition of indigenous rights in New Caledonia: the story of an assimilation measure becoming the trigger for the acculturation of the French legal system Thomas Burelli and Régis Lafargue; Part III. Alternative Dispute Resolution: 9. Cultures of conflict: welcoming and resisting 'non-Western' influence in alternative dispute resolution Eric Reiter; 10. Rebalancing power and culture: the case of alternative dispute resolution Morgan Brigg; 11. Grassroots law in context: moving beyond the cultural justification Kristin Doughty; Part IV. Law in Conflicts: 12. Cannibal laws René Provost; 13. Beyond the paradox of exporting the rule of law: resilience and the war on drugs in the Americas David Chandler.
About the author
René Provost is Professor of Law at McGill University, Canada, where he was the founding director of the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism. He has researched and published widely on international law and legal pluralism. In 2015, he was named a Fellow of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Québec for his contribution to the advancement of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences.
Summary
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.
