Legal Pluralism among the Court Records of Medieval Egypt

The Internet, Legal Regulation and Legal Pluralism

Considerable academic effort is being expended in considering how to regulate various activities on the internet, particularly those as relate to obscene material, breaches of privacy and challenges to intellectual property rights. Post and Johnson (1997) offer the following solution which is typical; 'We believe that the most obvious answer to this question -existing territorial sovereigns -ma...

The Evolution of Global Legal Pluralism

Women’s Legal Agency and Property in the Court Records of Late 19th-Century Brava

Drawing on the Islamic court records of Brava, a small Indian Ocean port city on the southern Benadir coast of Somalia, dating from the period 1893-1900, this essay analyzes the legal agency and economic roles of the women of Brava and sheds new light on social (especially family) relations in this town. The qāḍī’s court records give evidence of married women’s fully recognized (even if qualifi...

Legal Competition in the Medieval World

We develop a model of competition between legal systems with overlapping jurisdictions based on Hotelling competition that suggests that, absent institutional reform, courts with overlapping jurisdictions will be driven to adopt divergent legal doctrines in order to extract rents from agents with heterogeneous preferences over which doctrine is applied to their case. This has the effect of weak...

Constitutionalism, Legal Pluralism, and International Regimes

The international legal order, although pluralist in structure, is in the process of being constitutionalized. This article supports this claim in several different ways. In the Part L I argue that most accepted understandings of "constitution" would readily apply to at least some international regimes. In Part II, I discuss different notions of "constitutional pluralism," and demonstrate that ...