This study examines Israeli judges’ incorporation of the Arabic language and Islamic religious sources in court rulings within Israel and the West Bank military courts. Analysing seventy-eight judicial decisions (1997–2024) and interviews with legal professionals, we identify six themes motivating this practice: persuasion, authority reinforcement, cultural bridging, mutual respect, substantiation and alternative reasoning. Both Arab and Jewish judges employ this approach across criminal, family and civil law cases. This linguistic and cultural integration enhances court decision legitimacy among Arabic-speaking litigants and fosters intercultural understanding within the legal system. The study contributes to discussions on legal pluralism, judicial behaviour and the role of language in multicultural judicial systems, illuminating how the Israeli legal system navigates its multicultural reality and the interplay between law, language and cultural identity.

This article examines interactions facilitated by legal pluralism in contemporary urban India. Employing a framework of semi-autonomous social fields, I focus on use rights exercised over “Waqf” properties and the role social fields so generated play in facilitating access to property rights for groups without social and economic capital. Viewing property through a relational lens and relying on the method of examining “trouble” disputes, I discuss two long-term disputes in a Sufi shrine of an urban village called Mehrauli, Delhi. I will advance two main arguments in the article. First, the operation of formal and informal legal orders forms a generative ground making access to resources more equitable. Second, formal and informal legal orders interact to form a dialectical relationship, such that it becomes difficult to tell which of the two is superior.

Beginning with the opening-up reforms of Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese government has treated law as a central tool for regulating the economy and guiding institutional transformation. Over the decades, since 1949, China’s path to modernization has been marked by profound, experimental transformations that selectively combined foreign expertise with Chinese foundations. A key feature of this process has been China’s strategic adoption and adaptation of legal transplants. While initially a recipient of foreign legal models, China is now increasingly exporting its own approaches through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This article examines how China’s engagement in shaping the legal and regulatory frameworks of host countries under the BRI differs from traditional models of legal transplants. Rather than imposing, China draws on its historical experience to adopt a pragmatic, adaptive strategy defined by three core characteristics: the combination of Chinese and Western practices; an emphasis on voluntariness tempered by asymmetrical power relations; and a prioritization of policy objectives over autonomous legal principles. While this strategy raises concerns about legal fragmentation and institutional coherence, it also fosters a space for legal pluralism, offering an alternative to the homogenization typically associated with Global North legal transplants.

Jiří Přibáň’s work deals with constitutional imaginaries, starting from the concept of social imaginaries as entities describing functionally differentiated modern society as one polity. Přibáň’s conception perceives constitutional imaginaries in terms of social systems, representing a socio-legal paradox, since constitutional imaginaries express both the constitution of social unity and its pluralism of values. The aim of this contribution is to explore the link between Přibáň’s work and some aspects of Luhmann and Teubner’s contributions to the theory of social systems. By highlighting these features, the Author tries to argue that contemporary imaginaries can work as constitutional forces that drive contemporary legal pluralistic regimes, including the European one, to the societal unity by warranting a systemic difference.

The Journal of Law and Religion began publishing as part of the larger revival and reimagination of the academic encounter with religion. More specifically, it sought from the start to examine an entire panoply of issues: secular law regarding religion, religious views of secular law and the state, political philosophy, political theology, religious law, and legal and religious pluralism as overarching ideas. What was at stake to the journal’s founders was not just intellectual curiosity but their conviction that this kaleidoscope of concerns was essential to reconstituting a healthy polity, to play a role in responding to a crisis of values that afflicted both religion and the secular state. The journal has also sought to consider questions across the full range of world religions, including non-Western religions. Again, this is not expanding the canon for its own sake. The larger story of legal systems and religions in all their specificity and complex interactions, as revealed by rigorous and imaginative analysis, could ideally help establish a counter-narrative to the simple pieties of modernity. The challenges today, especially our current state of political polarization, which envelops religion in its wake, are different, but they demand the same careful, expansive, scholarly agenda.

The United Nations (UN) has operated a longstanding peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), while simultaneously contributing to rule-of-law building and transitional justice processes. Sexual violence is widespread in the DRC including routine allegations against UN peacekeepers. The operation of numerous legal systems and judicial mechanisms in the DRC produces a legally plural environment that is difficult for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence to navigate, and this is especially true for survivors of peacekeeper-perpetrated sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA). In this paper, we explore justice-seeking among SEA survivors in the DRC and the challenges imposed by the complicated jurisdictions and layered legalities pertaining to SEA. Moreover, we argue that, beyond barriers to justice, we see a recession of justice for SEA produced by the United Nations and member states positioning SEA as distinct from other forms of gender-based harms and exacerbated through the legal navigational challenges faced by survivors.

Mounting climate-related floods, fires, droughts and storms across the globe raise crucial questions about the role of law in adjudicating rights and obligations. While climate litigation attracts scholarly attention, vulnerable populations often lack the means to use formal laws and courts. We draw on ethnographic interviews conducted in 2022 in the city of Cartagena, Colombia, to study how residents of informal settlements exposed to flooding resist exclusionary climate adaptation laws. The findings show how formal law has exacerbated differential climate vulnerability, and resulted in “seawalls for the rich, relocation (and stalled adaptation) for the poor.” In this context, residents claim land in risk-zones through a local rule system known as “the law of the four poles.” We argue that by challenging the legality of the state, and creating a rival legal order that better represents locally identified interests and entitlements, they are claiming a political voice in climate adaptation. We advance theory in both climate adaptation and sociology of law and discuss how the law can better reflect not only the science behind climate change but also the interest and needs of marginalized communities.

As societies grapple with mitigating or adapting to climate change, law plays a prominent role in the social relations that constitute a response. In this essay, we briefly review of the many different perspectives on law and climate change offered by the authors in this special issue of Law and Society Review. From transnational human rights activism to constitutional litigation to local practices and all around the globe, both the powerful and the marginalized draw on legal institutions and actors in multiple arenas and at multiple scales to address the consequences of climate change. Together, these articles show that law is not confined to courtrooms or judicial systems or regulations; rather, law offers both limitations and opportunities in the ongoing struggle over climate change.

This paper considers the utilisation, appropriation, and renegotiation of colonial knowledge in the form of land and population registers by local litigants in eighteenth-century Dutch colonial Sri Lanka. Using a database compiled from thirty-three civil court cases held before the Landraad rural council of Colombo, I highlight how Lankan litigants frequently used the colonial thombo registers as evidence to have their property recognised. Moreover, I show that these registers were not just utilised but also altered through this process, particularly through the promotion of alternative knowledge in the form of local witness testimonies and ola palm leaf documents during court cases. I subsequently argue that we should reconsider how we view colonial knowledge. Rather than a static, top-down view from a foreign bureaucracy on a colonised society, this knowledge could be appropriated and even altered through the acts of local agents, in turn changing what was known by the colonial state and thus creating a “looping effect” of knowledge production.