Asking the Sovereignty Question in Global Legal Pluralism: From “Weak” Jurisprudence to “Strong” Socio‐Legal Theories of Constitutional Power Operations

Abstract

The article examines recent theories of legal and constitutional pluralism, especially their adoption of sociological perspectives and criticisms of the concept of sovereignty. The author argues that John Griffiths's original dichotomy of "weak" and "strong" pluralism has to be reassessed because "weak" jurisprudential theories contain useful sociological analyses of the internal differentiation and operations of specific legal orders, their overlapping, parallel validity and collisions in global society. Using the sociological methodology of legal pluralism theories and critically elaborating on Teubner's societal constitutionalism, the author subsequently reformulates the question of sovereignty as a sociological problem of complex power operations communicated through the constitutional state's organization and reconfigured within the global legal and political framework.Theories of legal pluralism are commonly perceived as critical of the very concept of sovereignty because the plurality of legal orders and regimes indicates the absence of the ultimate rule of recognition, decision-making power or the basic norm. They are equally critical of state law as a supreme legal order backed by political deliberation and decision-making, and emphasise the role of non-state legal orders, agents and organisations. Pluralistic perspectives have been adopted by mainstream jurisprudence and the discourse of legal pluralism is thus currently typical of the differentiation between the "weak" juristic concept of legal pluralism drawing on the state legal systems and the "strong" concept of legal pluralism drawing on sociological and anthropological perspectives of law (Griffiths 1986, 5-8).In this article, therefore, I pursue the goal of analysing transformations of state sovereignty in global society by critically examining theories of legal and constitutional pluralism. In the first two sections, I establish the connection between legal globalisation and theories of legal pluralism, and discuss MacCormick and Walker's theories of legal and constitutional pluralism especially in the EU context. bs_bs_banner