Abstract:
Legal practice increasingly features interactions of state law and tikanga Māori, across all aspects of private and public law; across legal education for students, practitioners, and the judiciary; and, last if not least, in the field of jurisprudence understood as theory of law. This interaction raises a rare jurisprudential emergency, asking how can/should legal theory explain and evaluate plural claims to legal authority, plural claims to the justified use of law’s coercive force, and plural claims to the administration of justice? How many legal orders operate in Aotearoa NZ? How many (if any) are justified, and in what combination(s)? The present work is part of a larger project examining what ‘pluralist jurisprudence’ combining theories of plurality – the fact of plural legal orders; and theories of pluralism – the endorsement of plural legal orders, offers to substantive analyses and evaluations of local interactions of state law and tikanga.