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At first blush, one might think that scholars of legal pluralism and those who study comparative law would be fellow travellers. After all, both groups of scholars are fundamentally focused on the multiplicity of legal systems in the world. Comparativists seek to catalog the components of various legal orders, either to demonstrate fundamental differences among those components or to reveal fundamental similarities. Meanwhile, legal pluralists study the inevitable interaction and overlap among legal and quasi-legal systems. Accordingly, legal pluralists and comparativists would seem to share a common analytical framework, based on the simultaneous existence of multiple legal orders. Yet, the two scholarly fields have not always operated in concert. The divergence arises because comparative law scholars, like most legal scholars, have tended to study only official state-based municipal law, and they have often ignored the numerous other legal and quasi-legal orders that inevitably occupy the social field. These non-state normative systems are precisely the ones that legal pluralists insist we recognize and study. Accordingly, there has been a sometimes unspoken, but nevertheless real tension between the two bodies of scholarly literature. But is that tension inevitable? Is comparative law by definition tied to formal state-based municipal systems? To me, there seems no reason for that to be the case. It is true, of course, that it is often easier, as a practical matter, to pull apart components of municipal systems for study. After all, such systems tend to have codified and written down their substantive and procedural rules, as well as the outcomes of individual cases. Thus, the materials are far more easily accessible on electronic databases and through official newspaper accounts. It is not at all clear, however, that there is any conceptual reason to limit comparative law study to official municipal law. All that is required for comparative law scholars to ply their trade is for there to be some form of institutionalized doctrine to use Roger Cotterrell’s helpful definition of law as well as a group of human beings applying that doctrine. Neither of those parameters requires that the “law” in question be municipal law. Consider three classic strands of comparative law scholarship. The first strand focuses on comparing and contrasting procedural and substantive norms. The second emphasizes migration and transplantation of procedural and substantive norms from one legal order to another. And the third aims to identify various structural, substantive, ideological and historical features that are common to “families” of legal systems. Taken together, these strands encompass most of what comparative law scholars do, and yet, again, none of these activities necessarily requires that the procedural and substantive norms or the institutional structures in question actually be formal municipal law.

A BRIEF NOTE ON LEGAL PLURALISM AND COMPARATIVE LAW