Western courts tend to treat as irrelevant and inappropriate those accounts that try to introduce the small print of litigants’ social lives (Conley and O’Barr 1990). Damaska’s distinction between the hierarchical and coordinate perfect and Weber’s distinction between formal and substantive rationality direct our attention to a central issue concerning law—the diploma to which different authorized systems are autonomous. Formalist theories of regulation posit a self-contained enterprise separate from the rest of society (Kelsen 1967), while most Marxist theories view legislation solely as an instrument of domination (Spitzer 1983).

Alongside issues of legal pluralism, we aim to stress the a number of sites of knowledge manufacturing that inform problems with indigeneity and that contextualize the engagement of native peoples with formal and casual legal institutions. The CRN is based on the belief that a full understanding of what it means to be indigenous is inconceivable with out taking the authorized … Read More