1. Griffiths states that "legal centralism is a myth, an ideal, a claim, an illusion." (cited in Tamanaha,* 5) Drawing on Tamanaha,* Calavita, and Valverde define and examine the significance legal centralism has for the "Law and Society perspective." Why is it important to study the relationship between law and society? *Note: links are for the full chapters, you only need to read pages 1-10 of Tamanaha. the assignment should be use standard academic formatting: title page, Times New Roman 12-point font, double-spaced, 1″ margins, and page numbers. Minimum 4 pages Citation APA Readings is below.. Introduction: Three Themes Reading Legal pluralism is everywhere. In every social arena one examines, a seeming multiplicity of legal orders exists. There are village, municipal, and county laws of various types; there are state, district, or regional laws of various types; there are national, transnational, and international laws of various types. In many societies there are additional forms of law, like indigenous law, customary law, religious law, and the law of distinct ethnic or cultural communities. The contemporary period has witnessed a vast increase in public and private regulatory regimes on various matters at all levels. Coexisting forms of law may be similar in orientation, coordinated with one another, and mutually supportive or complementary; they may make competing claims of authority, impose conflicting norms, and operate through contrasting processes; they may exist wholly apart or thoroughly intertwined. Legal pluralism creates uncertainty because people may not know which legal regime will apply to their situation, and it also creates opportunities for people to opportunistically select from among legal regimes, or to pit one form of law against another in pursuit of their goals. Legal officials in situations of legal pluralism face potential rivals, compete for power and resources, and can be mutually cooperative or antagonistic. Legal pluralism is everywhere in another sense. First mentioned in the 1960s, references to legal pluralism exploded in ensuing decades as the notion propagated across academic fields from anthropology, to sociology, legal history, comparative law, international law, transnational law, and jurisprudence.1 Two decades after its initial introduction in legal anthropology, in a 1988 overview that significantly boosted its visibility, Sally Engle Merry declared: "Legal pluralism is a central theme in the reconceptualization of the law/ society relation." 2 More recently, “legal pluralism has become a standard fare in international and comparative law circles."3 A collection on "pluralist jurisprudence" declared that legal theorists must move beyond their state centered focus to take account of coexisting forms of law.4 Interest in legal pluralism extends beyond academia. Governments and development agencies have spent several billion dollars to develop state legal systems across the Global South with disappointing results.5 Law and development theory and practice emphasize the importance of the rule of law and economic development. Customary and religious systems of law were seen as parochial, backwards, regressive, and antithetical to women's rights and human rights. World Bank development experts observed, "Development theorists and practitioners have tended to either blindly ignore the ubiquitous phenomena of legal pluralism or regard it as a constraint on development, a defective condition that must be overcome in the name of modernizing, state building, and enhancing 'the rule of law." "6 Recently, however, development practitioners "have begun to reexamine some of the underlying assumptions about legal pluralism and to explore the opportunities that might exist in contexts where legal pluralism is a pervasive reality."7 An international relations theorist focusing on post- conflict situations observed that “Understanding legal pluralism is important for any legal or policy intervention, including but by no means limited to state building."8 Even as it has secured the attention of growing numbers of scholars and development practitioners, however, the notion of legal pluralism remains mired in complexity, confusion, and disagreement. After reviewing two decades of proliferating literature on legal pluralism jurisprudence William Twining remarked, “I have come away feeling that it is little better than a morass."9 A factor contributing to the confusion is that scholars from multiple disciplines have invoked the notion of legal pluralism. Each discipline is internally divided into various schools of thought, and academic disciplines differ from one another in their bodies of knowledge, concepts, and objectives. While on the surface it might appear that a single notion of legal pluralism is applied across fields, an impression perpetuated by shared references to the same cluster of theorists (John Griffiths, Eugen Ehrlich, Sally Falk Moore, etc.), different meanings of legal pluralism are being utilized, often unrecognized as such. Adding to the confusion is the thin meaning and capaciousness of the term pluralism. Pluralism simply means more than one, which can be applied to anything and framed at various levels of specificity and generality. The label legal pluralism has been used to refer to a plurality of interpretations of a single set of laws; to subsystems of law within a single system; to the same tribunals applying distinct bodies of law and separate tribunals applying different bodies of law within a system; to hybrid legal systems that grew out of the interaction between distinct bodies of law; to the coexistence of separate forms of law within a single society; to the coexistence of different subject matter regimes within international law; to the coexistence of multiple legal systems between and across states; and other variations. Each of these examples has been discussed in the literature on legal pluralism, though they are very different. Complexities and disagreement about the meaning of “law” is another source of confusion. A core proposition across most versions of legal pluralism is that state law is not the only form of law. This assertion requires a definition or concept of law or some way to identify what counts as law as well as to distinguish law from non- law. Legal pluralists have grappled with these threshold issues for five decades now, with multiple concepts of law proposed in the literature, and no end in sight. This struggle is understandable. "What is law?" has never been resolved despite a multitude of attempts by theorists going back centuries. Since each version of legal pluralism is shaped by how law is conceived, there are multiple versions of legal pluralism, each built around a different view of law. The consequence is "a pluralism of legal pluralisms."10 Legal pluralism is a conceptual mess. This book explains legal pluralism in two senses. First, drawing from history and theory, I explain why and how legal pluralism is a common phenomenon across societies past and present, and I show its consequences. Second, I explain what is involved in theoretical disputes surrounding legal pluralism, and I articulate a way to frame legal pluralism that works for development practitioners, scholars, and theorists. This undertaking poses a formidable challenge. The topic crosses over multiple disciplines and audiences with different interests and concerns, and the literature addressing legal pluralism is enormous and expanding too rapidly to stay abreast of. This book is not a comprehensive review of every situation of legal pluralism and everything written about it in every field, which would fill a never- completed set of volumes. Because legal pluralism is literally everywhere, it is impossible to cover comprehensively. Instead, using illustrative examples, I present legal pluralism in broad strokes that convey the most salient empirical, theoretical, and normative issues and consequences involved, in clear prose aimed at a general audience. To set up this exploration, in this Introduction I first identify what legal pluralism is framed in opposition to: the image of monistic state law. Next I set forth two streams of legal pluralism: abstract legal pluralism constructed by theorists versus folk legal pluralism understood in social- historical terms. Then I outline three categories of law that appear throughout the book: community law, regime law, and cross- polity law. These are preliminary clarifications of major themes that arise time and again in discussions of legal pluralism, filled out in the course of the book. I close with a brief illustration of legal pluralism. Monistic State Law Pluralism can be applied to anything involving more than one. In academic settings it is usually applied by way of contrast to a unity of some sort. "The conceptual logic of pluralism thus pits it dialectically against ‘monism,' whatever field of human investigation we care to consider."11 Legal pluralism stands in opposition to the widely held image of monistic state law. "What Is Legal Pluralism?” (1986) by John Griffiths, which significantly shaped