030152 VO What is Legal Pluralism? (2016S)

Students will become familiar with social science contributions to a non-state bound definition of law, and understand the meaning of Legal Pluralism.

The class will introduce into some of the most important approaches that have been developed by social scientists and legal scholars to analyse the interaction of state law with non-state systems of social rules and social control. Starting with the approach developed by the Austrian scholar Eugen Ehrlich, who was a forerunner of the study non-state "Living law", a special focus of the class will be cast on the more recent debates about Legal Pluralism. The class will also discuss recet developments concerning the recognition of non-official law by modern Latin American Constitutions, and the consequences of these developments for a critical legal theory in general.