This interdisciplinary book brings together leading social and legal scholars to tackle the incompatibility of marriage laws with contemporary social reality in Europe. Their critique is based on the assumption that individuals should be able to choose how they organise their close relationships. The contributors emphasise the importance of pluralism of beliefs, values, cultures, and lifestyles and the consequent need for legal recognition to make individuals' private choices valid and respected. The first part of the book establishes the foundation for the subsequent chapters by exploring the advantages and challenges of focusing on values while accommodating relationship design plurality, the impact of the European Court of Human Rights on the issue, and the transformation of the institution of marriage. The second part presents different legal responses to non-state marriages, particularly religious marriages among Muslim communities, and proposals for reform. The third part of the book features empirical research on the marital experiences of two communities: Muslims and migrants. The chapters concentrate on polygyny among female converts to Islam, the importance of religious knowledge for practising Muslim women in securing rights in their marital relationships, transnational and interreligious marriages, and the impact of acculturative orientation and position in the dual labour market on the choice of life partner among Polish migrant women. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers, and policymakers working in the areas of human rights law, family law, legal anthropology, law and religion, socio-legal studies, feminism and queer studies, and sociology of family.

"Abstract Global legal pluralism has become one of the leading analytical frameworks for understanding and conceptualizing law in the twenty-first century"--

Laura Grenfell critically evaluates how the rule of law is contextualized and promoted in states where customary law is prevalent.

Previous efforts at legal development have focused almost exclusively on state legal systems, many of which have shown little improvement over time. Recently, organizations engaged in legal development activities have begun to pay greater attention to the implications of local, informal, indigenous, religious, and village courts or tribunals, which often are more efficacious than state legal institutions, especially in rural communities. Legal pluralism is the term applied to these situations because these institutions exist alongside official state legal systems, usually in a complex or uncertain relationship. Although academics, especially legal anthropologists and sociologists, have discussed legal pluralism for decades, their work has not been consulted in the development context. Similarly, academics have failed to benefit from the insights of development practitioners. This book brings together, in a single volume, contributions from academics and practitioners to explore the implications of legal pluralism for legal development. All of the practitioners have extensive experience in development projects, the academics come from a variety of backgrounds, and most have written extensively on legal pluralism and on development.

This book is a collection of contributions by leading scholars on theoretical and contemporary problems of militant democracy. The term 'militant democracy' was first coined in 1937. In a militant democracy preventive measures are aimed, at least in practice, at restricting people who would openly contest and challenge democratic institutions and fundamental preconditions of democracy like secularism - even though such persons act within the existing limits of, and rely on the rights offered by, democracy. In the shadow of the current wars on terrorism, which can also involve rights restrictions, the overlapping though distinct problem of militant democracy seems to be lost, notwithstanding its importance for emerging and established democracies. This volume will be of particular significance outside the German-speaking world, since the bulk of the relevant literature on militant democracy is in the German language. The book is of interest to academics in the field of law, political studies and constitutionalism.

We live in a world of legal pluralism, where a single act or actor is potentially regulated by multiple legal or quasi-legal regimes imposed by state, substate, transnational, supranational and nonstate communities. Navigating these spheres of complex overlapping legal authority is confusing and we cannot expect territorial borders to solve all these problems. At the same time, those hoping to create one universal set of legal rules are also likely to be disappointed by the sheer variety of human communities and interests. Instead, we need an alternative jurisprudence, one that seeks to create or preserve spaces for productive interaction among multiple, overlapping legal systems by developing procedural mechanisms, institutions and practices that aim to manage, without eliminating, the legal pluralism we see around us. Global Legal Pluralism provides a broad synthesis across a variety of legal doctrines and academic disciplines and offers a novel conceptualization of law and globalization.

Legal Pluralism in Conflict offers a new theoretical perspective for conceptualising and analysing the relationship between ethnic minority laws and the official legal order. It will be invaluable to students and researchers concerned with law's relationship to and treatment of ethnic and religious diversity, as well as to those with wider interests in the limits and possibilities of political pluralism.