Ann Stewart

Pascale Fournier’s book addresses the highly contentious and complex relationship between multiculturalism, gender relations, and family law in liberal states. It adds to the rapidly growing body of legal scholarship that grapples with the legal consequences of cultural diversity within states that once may have contributed through colonialism to the creation of pluralist legal systems ‘elsewhere.’ Unfortunately, this scholarship tends to replicate the historical divide with too little attention paid to the rich analyses of ‘law’ by those working on and within legal systems in what can now be described as the ‘global south.’ Hopefully the series in which Fournier’s book is published (Cultural Diversity and Law edited by Prakash Shah) will bridge this gap.