structural:reformatting, information:highlighting
Legal pluralism

Legal pluralism is a concept developed by legal sociologists and social anthropologists "to describe multiple layers of law, usually with different sources of legitimacy, that exist within a single state or society". It is also defined "as a situation in which two or more legal systems coexist in the same social field". Legal pluralists define law broadly to include not only the system of courts and judges backed by the coercive power of the state, but also the "non-legal forms of normative ordering". Legal pluralism consists of many different methodological approaches and as a concept, it embraces "diverse and often contested perspectives on law, ranging from the recognition of different legal orders within the nation-state, to a more far reaching and open-ended concept of law that does not necessarily depend on state recognition for validity. This latter concept of law may come into being whenever two or more legal systems exist in the same social field".