Legal pluralism and the interpretive limits of law

The Problematic - Recognition, Interpretation, and Identity as Law Much of the literature on legal pluralism in relation to Indigenous peoples is concerned with the recognition phase of the encounter between non-Indigenous state law and Indigenous law. By recognition, I mean the establishment of an ongoing relationship between the two kinds of legal system, together with their respective cultures and peoples. An intriguing question raised in this literature concerns the extent to which state law can properly recognise Indigenous law without losing its identity as law. For example, in her chapter in this collection, Kirsten Anker speaks of the legal pluralist instinct ‘that there is something distinctively legal in the encounter between courts and Indigenous claimants’ and asks ‘if state law is relativized and the definition of law broadened, then what stops what is particular to law disappearing into culture or social life in general?' In a similar vein, Provost’s introduction to this collection asks, ‘to what extent is legal discourse capable of accommodating multiple cultural narratives without losing its claim to normative specificity?' and ‘can legal pluralism create a richer model of legal knowledge, one that reflects plural cultural narratives, while still offering a normative foundation for formal legal processes?’ Implicit in these questions seems to be an assumption that law as a category of phenomena has a distinctive identity or nature. One of the ways in which we might conceive of this identity is in terms of a set of category-individuating properties. So, we might construe these questions as assuming that there is a set of properties that all instances of law (all members of the category of law) possess and which any given phenomenon must possess in order to be law - at least, by the lights of some or other community of agents. Latent here also is the view that if a given instance of state law changes (for example, in response to its encounter with Indigenous law) in a manner that renders it no longer sufficiently possessed of these category-individuating properties, then it is no longer law (or is no longer identifiable as law by the relevant community of agents).