Normative legal pluralism – a critique

Theories of legal pluralism predominantly claim to provide a more accurate description of the reality of normative orders, namely the legal order, in a society. According to this theory, law emerges from many different and diverse sources, there is a plurality of law-making actors, and legal norms of different origins overlap in the same social field. While this description has always applied to historical societies up to the era of centralized nation states, there are many indications that the development of transnational and global law has also led to a new legal pluralism. On the other hand, anyone who considers the concept of a centrally established, hierarchically ordered, universal and uniform law to be progress compared to the state of legal pluralism would have to criticize and want to overcome it. Normative legal pluralism is opposed to this criticism. Its greater responsiveness to the diverse rationalities of a complex global society is the main argument put forward in support of this. This article discusses different variants of normative legal pluralism and attempts to show that none of them can do without the assumption of a common legal horizon of meaning.