Le thème du pluralisme juridique hante la sociologie du droit depuis ses origines. Pour ne citer que ces exemples, déjà Eugen Ehrlich avait l'ambition de saisir la «diversité multicolore de la vie juridique». Et Max Weber distinguait le droit extra-étatique du droit étatique, objet formel de la science normative du droit. Le concept de pluralisme juridique, introduit plus tard pour saisir cette diversité, donnera lieu, comme on sait, à une ligne de travail spécifique dans le domaine «droit et société», matérialisée en particulier par la revue publiée depuis 1981 sous le titre Journal of Legal Pluralism; et il suscitera de stimulants débats. Jean-Guy Belley a apporté une contribution centrale à ces débats, notamment en signant l'entrée «Pluralisme juridique» du Dictionnaire encyclopédique de théorie et de sociologie du droit publié en 1988. Déjà bien des années plus tôt, il avait engagé une démarche rigoureuse de recherche centrée sur le pluralisme juridique comme paradigme fondamental de la science du droit. D'abord par sa thèse de doctorat complétée à Paris en 1977 sous la direction de Jean Carbonnier, par la suite comme professeur de droit des contrats et de sociologie du droit à la faculté de droit de l'Université Laval, enfin comme titulaire d'une Chaire de droit privé à l'université McGill. Ce rapport savant au pluralisme juridique s'est avant tout déployé sur le terrain de la sociologie du droit, une vaste entreprise dont le point culminant fut la publication, en 1998, de l'ouvrage Le contrat entre droit, économie et société.

The topic of legal pluralism has puzzled the sociology of law since its origins. To quote an early example, the aim of Eugen Ehrlich was to grasp the “colourful diversity of living law.” Max Weber, too, made a distinction between law beyond the state, on the one hand, and state law, on the other, the latter being the formal object of normative legal science. The concept of legal pluralism, later formulated in order to capture this diversity, gave rise, as is well known, to a specific line of inquiry in the domain of law and society; it has found concrete expression particularly in the Journal of Legal Pluralism, published under this title since 1981, and has triggered energetic debates. Jean-Guy Belley has made a crucial contribution to these debates, in particular by writing the entry on “pluralisme juridique” for the Dictionnaire encyclopédique de théorie et de sociologie du droit, published 1988. Years before, he had begun an ambitious research undertaking centred on legal pluralism as a fundamental paradigm for jurisprudence, first with a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Jean Carbonnier and later as a professor in contract law and sociology of law at McGill University. This scholarly relationship to legal pluralism developed first in the domain of sociology of law, through a comprehensive approach that culminated in 1998 with the publication of Le contrat entre droit, économie et société.

In history of legal ideas of the last generation in Canada, legal pluralism deserves an important place. There is a Quebec genre in the legal literature on pluralism that, for reasons one might well suspect, is less well-known elsewhere. The scholarship of Professor Jean-Guy Belley, one of the leading figures in the field, is deserving of a wider readership among non francophones. A translation on one of his most important papers, published at a critical moment in his personal development as a scholar, is presented here in the hope of introducing his work to new readers.

Why has Quebec proved such a fertile ground for the study of legal pluralism over the last generation? It is not that formalism in law is any less tenacious in Quebec than elsewhere, or that the state-made law is held in lower esteem. If anything, the fabled cult of enactment that characterizes modern civilian methodology has been exacerbated in the run-up to the adoption of the Civil Code of Québec and the twenty years since that moment. The mixed nature of Quebec legal sources, given that mixité is seen as much as a historical fact as the basis for a way of knowing law, cannot explain the wealth of scholarly attention devoted to diversity in law. Whether Quebec's brand of pluralism for law comes from factors such as linguistic and cultural diversity, an ongoing contact with Aboriginal law, or a special experience with religious law is a matter of ongoing speculation. But in the final analysis, it is not unfair to think that legal pluralism has flourished in Quebec because of the work of a handful of imaginative scholars who have invested their talent in this intellectual project.

Professor Jean-Guy Belley is plainly one of their number. His work as a theorist of legal pluralism is celebrated in Quebec and well read in France. Yet his prodigious scholarly output is less well known elsewhere in Canada, where that work would likely be understood to have special relevance. Indeed, over the past ten or so years, Professor Belley has placed increasing emphasis on Anglo-American legal scholarship and common-law sources in his teaching and thinking about law. The translation of the foregoing essay has therefore been prepared at once as a respectful homage to a friend and colleague and in the hope that, in a modest way, it might encourage a wider readership for his important work.

In this article Jean-Guy Belley examines the dichotomy between individuals and organizations, considered explicitly in connection with the development of the idea of legal pluralism. This idea—not the concept, which came later—had appeared in the early twentieth century, thanks to militant jurists who challenged the dominance of formal positivism and had an interest in legal sociology and anthropology. Their approach fitted in with legal realism (broadly understood), but specifically questioned the central role of the state in the production of law. That initial form of legal pluralism fuelled the renewal of legal thinking and fostered the development of the sociology of law, but it did not lastingly challenge the dominant status of positivism among jurists. In contrast, the “new legal pluralism” that has been rapidly growing in the last decades presents itself as new legal orthodoxy: paradoxically, the idea of legal pluralism, which originally illustrated the quest for intellectual emancipation from the formalist straitjacket (perhaps even emancipation of social life vis-à-vis the state), has turned into a new orthodoxy in the second era of modernity. That legal doctrine is clearly in harmony with the impersonal domination of private legal orders (especially of large economic organizations) over contemporary society.

In his recent works, Jean-Guy Belley, based on his research on legal pluralism, puts forward a disenchanted diagnosis of late modernity as characterized by the prominence of organizational phenomena and by a new kind of “break between collective and individual consciousness.” This diagnosis merits comparison with other global interpretations of social reality, in particular Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. Such a comparison suggests a possible development of the model that can be derived from Belley's work. It is worth taking into account the differences between organizations, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, functionally differentiated systems such as economy, law, or science. This could enable us to revisit ongoing evolutions with respect to human individuality. The hypothesis is that individuals today act more and more as agents of organizations, and less and less as professionals carrying out functionally differentiated activities, and that they are invited to experience themselves less as individual subjects, than as organization-individuals.

Contemporary shifts in legal pluralism theory (from weak, intra-state pluralism to strong, extra-state pluralism and from socio-scientific to critical legal pluralism) have raised important new questions about law as a normative phenomenon. This article argues for the significance of implicit and inferential legal norms. It begins by considering a movement of thought—evangelicalism—that subordinates the implicit and informal to the explicit and authorized. The essay then outlines the principal features of a non-chirographic legal pluralism and explores how regimes of written rules are consistently made over by those whose conduct they are presumptively meant to govern.

This article presents the results of an empirical study of the contractual practices of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) operating in the area of Dakar, Senegal, from the perspective of legal pluralism. The notion of internormativity developed by Jean-Guy Belley in his study of the relationships between Alcan and its suppliers serves to question the importance of state law in business relationships and economic development and the approach taken by the World Bank with respect to the relationship between formal and informal norms in developing countries.

This article reflects on the lesser-known theoretical effects of the dominance of legal monism by contrasting them with the advantages of an approach open to different forms of legal pluralism, including those prominent in the thought of Jean-Guy Belley. In the context of the growing phenomenon of “cause lawyering,” the authors illustrate how the theme of political engagement in law, present in the practice of advocacy and quietly influential for Belley, benefits from a theoretical outlook emancipated from the monist conventions that in many ways still have an impact on contemporary legal thought and the dominant reflexes of its epistemic community.

Belley proposes a “new legal pluralism” as a new way of thinking and a new perception of law. This conception of law is far from the dissident approach taken in the original understanding of legal pluralism. Instead, it introduces a subversive element by positing the “new legal pluralism” as a substitute for the monist conception of law. This perspective contributes to an understanding of Islamic law and opens up opportunities to explore the sources of Islamic law elaborated in the seventh century CE and redefine the interaction of religion and law at their political interface. The author's hypothesis is that the paradigm of legal pluralism is foundational to Islamic law. Belley's approach constitutes a way of understanding the limitations of the construction of law characterized as “religious.”

This article concerns the second round of consultations on the drafting of the 2002 Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations. In this context, it explores the nature of the “communication space” within which regulatory authorities and interest groups interact with each other. The authors analyse the extent to which the consultations met their main goal of remedying the lack of democratic legitimacy in the process of drafting the regulations. Both discourse analysis and analysis of the concrete results of the consultations reveal that the “communication space“ is shaped by certain pre-established rules. The authors codify and compare the arguments put forward by interest groups in their proposals for modifications as well as the justifications offered by Citizenship and Immigration Canada. They conclude that issues capable of calling into question the soundness of regulatory interventions, having already been dealt with during the first round of consultations, are seldom raised during the second round. The authors also assert that the relationship between state and non-state actors is complementary and interdependent rather than antagonistic, noting that interventions by interest groups have a real impact on the regulations. Consultation is at the root of plurality of modes of production of law within the legal order of the state. The article highlights the complementary nature of the norms produced by state and other sources of normativity and draws attention to the importance of the cooperation between state and civil society actors.

This article focuses on Jean-Guy Belley's interest in the relationship between law and the economy—an interest illustrated by his major work on the contractual practices of the multinational company Alcan. They lament contemporary economic sociology's lack of interest—until recently—in legal phenomena, which contrasts with the close attention paid by two historic figures in “economic sociology,” Max Weber and John R. Commons, to the relationships between law and economics. The authors argue that to fully grasp the importance of the legal dimension in socio-economic analysis, we must return to the foundational insights of Weber and Commons. However, they particularly stress differences between Weber and Commons as to the unity or heterogeneity of law and the economy, the role of ethics, the search for an all-encompassing approach in the construction of ideal-types, the various forms of constraint that characterize law (whether psychological, economic, or physical), and the distinction between state law and non-state law. The latter element is why the authors, like Belley himself, argue that due consideration for legal plurality should be a central thread in any sociological analysis of the interplay between law and the economy.