www.comparazionedirittocivile.it EXPLICIT – IMPLICIT LEGAL PLURALISM Elina N. Moustaira* Sommario 1. Introductory remarks. – 2. Legal hegemonism and WLT. – 3. Cryptotypes and legal pluralism. – 4. The critical legal pluralistic view – 5. Classics vs new forms of legal pluralism. – 6. A multiscalar legal system? – 7. Taking implicit law into account. – 8 Conclusion. 1. Law, it is stated, is a way through which facts can be represented and, consequently, gain meaning. It is a means of understanding the world, the other ways being science, art, religion, ethics, ideology, history 1 , to mention only a few. Often, if not always, these other ways are mingled together, in an obvious or less obvious manner and they contribute to the forming of the legal expressions of each people. At the same time and in the opposite way, the law of each people, at each place, tries to regulate these other ways (e.g. science, art) or, at least, to explain and use them (e.g. history, religion), in order to change. During this trajectory, law can be expressed formally, in a form easily recognizable by the people the coexistence of whom it aims to regulate (e.g. written laws, courts’ judgments) or can take more subtle appearances, though not less authoritative, not having minor prestige for them 2 . This formal or less formal appearance of the law might depend on the other ways of understanding the world; it might be their explicit or implicit “agent”. 2. Usually and almost traditionally, people whose laws have a formal imprint (obviously – and among others – the so-called Western people) tend to believe that they possess the absolute truth about the best articulated, the most efficient legal rules; that they should be the guides to all those “poor” people who cannot take care of themselves, not having reached such a high level of civilization or legal culture as they believe they have. This arrogance has been expressed in many ways, at many parts of the world, at various time periods. One notorious example of this arrogance is the “export”, the migration of legal rules, consequence of certain countries’ legal hegemonism. Versions of this attitude are those that promote a regime of global legal norms, adopting terms such as harmonization – the most lenient one – or transplantation or viral propagation 3 . * Professor of Comparative Law, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, School of Law. 1 F. Pirie, The Anthropology of Law, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 56-57. 2 Law can live and develop without jurists, that is without having a critically elaborated apparatus of knowledge, according to R. Sacco, Le droit africain. Anthropologie et droit positif, Dalloz, Paris 2009, p. 14. 3 R.A. Macdonald, Three Metaphors of Norm Migration in International Context , in 343 Brooklyn Journal of International Law, p. 603 (2009).