Rechtspluralismus in der Rechtsgeschichte

Abstract

Legal pluralism is not a conventional topic in legal history. Vice versa, legal history usually does not figure prominently in scholarship on legal pluralism. This article aims to show how both disciplines and topics can benefit from each other. To this end, the article conceives legal pluralism as nomos of nomoi. This concept of legal pluralism neither exhausts legal pluralism in conflicts of material law or jurisdiction, nor in the competition between law and non-law, nor in the pluralistic genesis of law. Instead, it focuses on the relationships between the legal system and its legal lifeworld, between legal texts and legal culture, and between law and its nomos.
Legal history not only provides examples for this concept of legal pluralism, it specifies the theoretical ideas and fills the concept with substance. In this manner, legal history irritates the routines of legal pluralism and uncovers the diversity of past relationships between law and the legal lifeworld. By drawing on the case of the debate on legal customs in the early Middle Ages, this article reveals the theoretical insights that can be gained by synthesizing legal history and scholarship on legal pluralism. In particular, it offers subtle illustrations of how law and normativity, law and violence, and law and its media have interacted in distinct ways. In addition, the article argues that the turn to the nomos of nomoi, the alternative conception of law, and the pluralistic focus on interlegality open up new perspectives for historical legal research.