Book Launch:In Pursuit of Pluralist Jurisprudence

The Centre for Legal Theory (CLT) hosted a book launch for CLT Deputy Director, Associate Professor Nicole Roughan and CLT Director, Professor Andrew Halpin to celebrate the publication of their edited book entitled “In Pursuit of Pluralist Jurisprudence” on 11 October 2017.

The book was the product of a research project funded by Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1, culminating in two workshops in Singapore.

The pluralist turn in jurisprudence has led to a search for new ways of thinking about law. The relationships between state law and other legal orders such as international, customary, transnational or indigenous law are particularly significant in this development. Collecting together new work by leading scholars in the field, this volume considers the basic questions about what would be an appropriate theoretical response to this shift: How precisely is it to be undertaken? Is it called for by developments in legal practice or are these adequately addressed by current legal theory? What normative challenges are raised, and what fresh promises might the pluralist turn hold? What distinctive insights can it offer for theorising about law? This book presents a rich variety of resources drawn from a number of theoretical approaches and demonstrates how they might be brought together to generate an increasingly important pluralist jurisprudence.

The guest commentator, Professor Alec Stone Sweet, provided his perspective on the book and raised some fascinating issues for the editors, Associate Professor Nicole Roughan and Professor Andrew Halpin.

‘This collection of high quality contributions is a must-read for anyone interested in the various challenges in theorising the phenomena of non-state law. It is the first book of its kind to recognize that while theoretical work on the emergence and prevalence of non-state law has grown exponentially over the last twenty years, to date there has been no sustained reflection on the methodological commitments and goals of such work. Roughan and Halpin have done remarkably well in drawing together a truly impressive range of scholars from diverse disciplines to begin such an investigation’, wrote Michael Giudice, Associate Professor, York University, Toronto.

The book is available for purchase from Cambridge University Press: http://www.cambridge.org/9781107183964