Negotiating State and Non-State Law

Non-state law is playing an increasing role in both public and private ordering. Numerous organizations have emerged alongside the nation-state each purporting to provide their members with rules and norms to govern their conduct and organize their affairs. The nation-state increasingly finds itself sandwiched between two broad and contrasting categories of non-state law. The first - law above the state - captures legal systems that function across the territorial borders of nation-states. The second category - law below the state - includes forms of local customary religious and indigenous law. As these forms of non-state law persist and proliferate alongside the nation-state the relationship between state and non-state law becomes more complex multifaceted and tense. This volume addresses this relationship considering whether and to what extent state and non-state law can coexist and how each form of law seeks to influence as well as transform the other.