While the long-awaited first edition of this book was explicitly directed at a specific student readership, it attracted much attention worldwide as a pioneering model of global legal analysis. This revised second edition ventures further beyond the still somewhat exotic ambit of comparative legal education pursued at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London. It places legal pluralism more confidently into the mainstream study of comparative law, addressing some of the serious deficiencies of comparative law and legal theory in a global context.

Having read much of what appeared since 2000 in this fertile but still largely uncultivated field, I feel empowered to write with more clarity about the challenging experience of applying in practice what some writers, particularly Santos (1995), Twining (2000) and Cotterrell (2003), have been suggesting as viable strategies to promote plurality-sensitive, globality-conscious legal theory. There has been growing recognition of the fact that academic activities in the complex fields of legal theory and comparative law remain underdeveloped and still too eurocentric. As Western academics we seem, by our own histories and training, to be too wedded to ways of perceiving and studying law that do not take sufficient account of the culture-specific social embeddedness of legal phenomena in the world. We continue to ignore principles and models of good practice that have been developed elsewhere, particularly in Asia and Africa.