Permutation—do the plan and [alternative]—we can make pragmatic use of the law without entrenching it.

Eric Ip 2010, Doctor of Philosophy candidate, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, (“Globalization and the future of the law of the sovereign state,” 2010, Oxford University Press and New York University School of Law, https://academic.oup.com/icon/article/8/3/636/623517, DOA: 6-25-2018)

The entrenched vision of law as a “uniform and monopolistic” set of rules that governs a given community is currently experiencing a collapse.29 To approach legal phenomena pluralistically—from the multiplicity of “global, international, transnational, regional, inter-communal, municipal, substate and non-state local” perspectives— enhances our understanding of the globalization of international governance.30 A “useful” legal pluralism should recognize the importance of state law but refrain from assuming that everything is inferior to it.31 State law should be neither understood as the supreme system of social ordering nor simply seen as parallel to other legal orders. The relationship between the law of the state and other normative structures is crucial to the understanding of legal phenomena as a whole.32

Contemporary jurisprudential scholars, such as H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, Hans Kelsen, and Joseph Raz, remain too focused on scholarly approaches that concentrate excessively on formal state legal norms.33 In particular, Hart and Kelsen are largely against the notions of legal pluralism and nonstate law.34 Many professional lawyers rely on the primacy of the “closed systems” of state law as the “regulator of social relations.”35 Mainstream social-science writings on globalization often neglect the role of law. However, legal academia tends to emphasize the role of legal forces to the detriment of globalization.36 As such, legal pluralism, which recognizes the coexistence of multiple legal orders within the same social space, has become more important than ever.37