Concerns about legal pluralism, the co-existence of more than one legal system within a state, have become pronounced in recent years, owing to fears about the operation of sharia law in Western societies. At the same time, the concept of legal pluralism has become ubiquitous within legal literature. Paradoxically, the concept is both politically controversial and academically banal. This article contends that a major failing of the concept of legal pluralism has been the inability to distinguish legal norms from other forms of social control. It is suggested that this failure can be overcome by developing the concept of a ‘legal order’ as found in the work of Maleiha Malik and the understanding of law as discourse in the work of the German theorists Niklas Luhmann and Robert Alexy. It is argued that developing these approaches provides a means by which legal norms can be distinguished without adopting either a wholly objective or a completely subjective approach and without focusing exclusively upon the legal norms generated by the state.

中文翻译：

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法律多元化的失败

由于对西方社会伊斯兰教法运作的担忧，近年来人们对法律多元化（一个国家内多个法律体系的共存）的担忧变得明显。与此同时，法律多元主义的概念在法律文献中无处不在。矛盾的是，这个概念在政治上是有争议的，在学术上却是平庸的。本文认为，法律多元化概念的一个主要缺陷是无法将法律规范与其他形式的社会控制区分开来。有人建议，通过发展马莱哈·马利克（Maleiha Malik）著作中的“法律秩序”概念以及德国理论家尼克拉斯·卢曼（Niklas Luhmann）和罗伯特·阿列克西（Robert Alexy）将法律理解为话语，可以克服这种失败。