Theorizing Justice under Conditions of Global Legal Pluralism

Abstract

There are distinct challenges to the construction of a theory of justice, in both the national and transnational sphere, under conditions of global legal pluralism. Pluralism shapes theories of global and domestic justice not so much by proposing new normative principles but by challenging prevailing methodological assumptions. Taking John Rawls’s theory of justice as a case study, this chapter illustrates how global legal pluralism complicates Rawls’s idealization of a well-ordered society as requiring the full and effective compliance of citizens with a shared and public conception of justice. Ultimately, the most important way in which global legal pluralism contributes to normative moral theory is by calling into question the ideal that the subject of justice can ever be fixed, that a political society can ever be bounded, or that there is a set of principles or a court of appeal that can order, with some degree of finality, the conflicting jurisdictional claims that bear on moral persons.