Special Workshop Abstracts

Special Workshop Title:	Law and Social Theory
Author:	Håkan Gustafsson, Department of Law, University of Göteborg
Paper Title:	Legal Polyvalence: An Inquiry into Pluralism, Polycentricity and Legal Values
Abstract:	The legal doctrine of a coherent legal system and a unified hierarchy of sources of law has been challenged by the contemporary trends in legal theory that focus on legal pluralistic tendencies in modern societies. A legal order can be regarded as composed of a multitude of overlapping historical legal systems (parallelity), which do not simply vanish, but continue to coexist within today’s present legal order. ‘Classical’ legal pluralism, influenced by anthropology, was occupied with studies in colonies. During the last 30 years studies on legal pluralism have shifted, and discovered strong pluralist traces in the post-modern and post-industrial western societies. The ‘new’ legal pluralism hold the view that legal pluralism is a common social feature and it might even be claimed that we witness today an increase of legal pluralism and differentiation. There is an increased awareness of the fragmentation of the ‘sources’ of law and a theory of legal polycentricity has been suggested, according to which it is held that legal norms are produced in many centres and that the use of the legal sources is in fact polycentric too. By using theories of pluralism and polycentrism it becomes evident that law evolve out of a range of different social settings and historical contexts, which fundamentally are a result of different values. The present thesis proposes that the legal system is based on and permeated by values, often by contradictory nature. The phrase ‘legal polyvalence’ is used to designate the ‘many-valued’ character of law. The theory of ‘legal polyvalence’ combines external-empirical and internal-normative views on the legal system, a standpoint which is contrasted against the predominant opinion held by conventional legal science based on monocentricity and monovalence. The theory of legal polyvalence refutes the modernist conception of a coherent unity of law, and in a post-modern spirit emphasises the fundamental disunity and basic fragmented character of law. This does not however give way to ‘anything goes’ - on the contrary, by exposing the implicit values underlying the legal system and making them explicit, the aim of the theory of legal polyvalence is to facilitate normative as well as social responsibility.