Workshop: Legal Pluralism in Personal Status Law: Comparative and Historical Perspectives

organised by the Research Group: Human Rights, Constitutional Politics and Religious Diversity

As religious diversity has become increasingly controversial and politicized over the last few decades, questions of legal pluralism have moved to the forefront in public debate. Influenced by migration, missionary movements, a growing body of international or transnational law, and post-colonial transformations, nation-states across the globe have seen the increasing public salience of state and non-state forms of legal pluralism.
Legal pluralism is an important but contested concept in socio-legal studies. The concept of legal pluralism has mostly been used by legal anthropologists to study the interactions between native populations? norm systems and state laws in colonial settings. More recently it has also been used to study the complex relationships between migrants? norm systems and the legal systems in their states of residence. Legal pluralism departs from the assumption that there are sources of law other than the state, arguing that non-state forms of normative ordering may be as important as state law in regulating every day family life, and should therefore be included in the term "law". However, the concept of legal pluralism and in particular the broad and vague concept of law it adopts have drawn increasing criticism (e.g.: Tamanaha 1993, 2008). First of all, because of the focus on non-state "legal" norms, conventional approaches tend to overlook forms of state-sanctioned legal pluralism, such as the religiously divided personal status law systems in some post-colonial non-Western polities. Secondly, such approaches also tend to suffer from "methodological nationalism" as they mostly focus on legal pluralism within state borders while ignoring international legal frameworks such as human rights law and migrants? involvement with multiple state legal systems and international private law. Lastly, there is little comparative empirical work on how legal pluralism actually operates across space and time. Addressing these gaps in the literature is essential to improve our understanding of the implications of legal pluralism for citizenship as a set of individual and group rights, as a repertoire of practices regulating state society relations, and as an institutional mechanism of integration in diverse societies.
This workshop aims to analyze, in interdisciplinary and comparative fashion, the empirical dynamics of legal pluralism. Its main thematic focus is on personal status law as one of the primary manifestations of legal pluralism across a wide range of religious traditions and national contexts. Its regional and comparative focus is on Europe and Middle Eastern polities where the governance of religious diversity has historically, and recently, been a challenge. To better understand the empirical consequences of legal pluralism in personal status law, the workshop analytically distinguishes three interrelated questions. The first question asks how legal pluralism impacts on legal mobilization and judicial activism. In other words, how do different religious and non-religious actors negotiate rights, authority and legitimacy in institutional settings of legal pluralism? The second question addresses the conditions under which legal pluralism, notably the plurality of legal orders with autonomous jurisdiction, enhances and/or erodes rights, and for whom. The third question is whether and how legal pluralism is reproducing existing communal identities or providing space for fluid identities. All three sets of question require intensive study of domestic socio-political contexts. Yet they also call for attention to the transnational transfer and diffusion of legal concepts, to international legal frameworks, and transregional religious and non-religious mobilizations.
The workshop is organized by the "Human Rights, Constitutional Law, and Religious Diversity" research group (https://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/501352.html),based at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Institute of Advanced Studies, at the University of Göttingen.

Workshop program:

Friday, 28th October


Introduction

9:30 Welcome [Matthias Koenig]

9:45-10:30 BAUDOUIN DUPRET (LEIDEN)
Keynote: Legal Pluralism, Plurality of laws, and Legal Practices: Theories, Critiques, and the Praxiological Re-specification

[CHAIR: MATTHIAS KOENIG]

10:30-10:45 Coffee Break

Panel I: Legal pluralism in the transition from empire to nation-states

10:45-12:45 AVI RUBIN (BE?ER SCHEVA)
Codification, Forum Shopping and "Personal Status" in the Late Ottoman Empire

JULIA MOSES (SHEFFIELD)
Marriage and its Dissolution: Religion, Pluralism and Politics of National Identity in the German Empire

NARENDA SUBRAMANIAN (MONTREAL)
Multicultural Colonial Legacies and Nationalist Policy Trajectories: Indian Personal Law in a Comparative Perspective

MIRJAM KÜNKLER (UPPSALA)
From Max Weber to René David: Explaining the Unification and Fragmentation of Family Law in the Post-Colony

Presentations and discussion [Chair: Sinem Adar]

12:45-14:00 Lunch

Panel II: Legal pluralism and judicial mobilization

14:00-15:30 LENA-MARIA MÖLLER (HAMBURG)
Inner-Islamic Legal Pluralism in Bahrain and the Struggle for a Shi'i Family Code

DÖRTHE ENGELCKE (GÖTTINGEN)
How Islamic Law Reform influences Christian Court Practice in Jordan: Legal Reform without State Involvement?

IRIS SPORTEL (GÖTTINGEN)
Dealing with multiple family law systems in transnational divorce

Presentations and discussion [Chair: Irene Schneider]

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

Panel III: Legal pluralism and rights

16:00-17:30 YÜKSEL SEZGIN (SYRACUSE)
Jurisdictional Competition and Internal Reform in Muslim family Law in Israel and Greece

DAPHNA HACKER (TEL AVIV)
Coordinating Familial Expectations in the Era of Bordered Globalization

NADJMA YASSARI (HAMBURG)
Using Functionalism to Make Sense of Pluralism ? the case of adoption and divorce

Presentations and discussions [Chair: Julia Mink]


Saturday, 29th October


Panel IV: Legal pluralism and identities

9:00-11:00 HANAN KHOLOUSSY (CAIRO)
The Refashioning of the Personal Status Courts in Semi-Colonial Cairo

MULKI AL-SHARMANI (HELSINKI)
Negotiating ?Muslimness? and Islamic Family Law in Finland: The Role of Mosques

SAMIA BANO (LONDON)
Critical Muslim Feminist Methodologies and British Muslim Women's Identity in Family Law Debates

JOHN BOWEN (ST. LOUIS)

Presentations and Discussion [Chair: Iris Sportel]

11:00-11:30 Coffee Break

Conclusion

Roundtable Discussion

11:30-13:30
MARIE-CLAIRE FOBLETS (HALLE)
AYELET SHACHAR (GÖTTINGEN)
IRENE SCHNEIDER (GÖTTINGEN)