Chapter 1 Legal Practice and Cultural Diversity: introduction

We have to think a little harder about the role and rule of law in a plural society of overlapping identities (Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, 2008) This collection brings together papers by anthropologists, political scientists and legal specialists who consider how contemporary cultural and religious diversity challenges legal practice, how legal practice responds to that challenge and how practice is changing in the encounter with the cultural diversity occasioned by large-scale, post-war immigration. Questions about cultural difference, and whether, or to what extent, such difference should be recognized by legal systems, have provoked much discussion among lawyers and others, and raise issues highly pertinent to current debates across the globe about integration, multiculturalism and the governance of diversity. They are also keenly contested. Well-documented controversies such as those over the demands of Sikhs to wear turbans or Muslim schoolgirls to wear the Islamic headscarf (hijab), over legislation to outlaw racial or religious hate-speech, or arranged and forced marriages, or about whether or not legal systems should acknowledge claims by Muslims to be able to live their lives according to shari’a principles, illustrate how contentious is the relationship between the law and diversity. Building on these recent debates, the present book seeks to contribute to theoretical and comparative accounts of the interaction of legal practice and cultural diversity by observing actual practices and interpretations which occur in jurisprudence and in public discussion, and examining how the wider environment shapes legal processes and is in turn shaped by them. The chapters are based on papers presented to a conference held in London in July 2007, sponsored b