This symposium has embodied everything I sought to promote in establishing this blog. First and foremost, it has housed frank but respectful criticism. In our piece The Ahistoricism of Legal Pluralism in International Criminal Law, we saw an implicit deference to extant law in prescriptive accounts of Global Legal Pluralism that we did not think could be justified normatively. In pointing this out, we spent much time discussing how to frame the argument so as to communicate respect for a set of excellent scholars who had done so much to inform our thinking about these problems, then sought out their criticism once our piece was finally complete as a mark of this respect. In turn, they have offered equally courteous and frank responses to our arguments. In all, I am so pleased that the exercise has conveyed a commitment to the primacy of ideas, a recognition of the great intellectual value of critique, and an inclination on all our parts to metabolize whatever impersonal emotions arise from scrutiny. I hope this reply registers in that spirit and promotes that scholarly culture.

I begin by offering a set of clarifications, which I suspect the piece itself should have made clearer. Ours was never a total assault on Legal Pluralism. I continue to believe that it plays a crucial role in a number of areas, in particular through its ability to undermine what James Sákéj Youngblood Henderson calls “the colonial contrived superiority of European law.”[1] Anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of law’s role in colonialism will know that withholding recognition of other pre-existing normative systems was a key element in this contrived superiority. In this light, Legal Pluralism is particularly important because it reasserts the authority of jurisgenerative communities other than the colonizing state while undermining rigid, hegemonic conceptions of what it means to have law. In many respects, this point explains our focus on state-made criminal law, even though this is deliberately a caricature of Legal Pluralism, as Paul Berman correctly points out. Nonetheless, as I will explain, our caricature eschews even more difficult problems for Global Legal Pluralism in an attempt to focus on a core of state law that Global Legal Pluralism’s deference to the legal requires it to embrace.

Reduced to its essence, our article was largely an attack on law as a necessary repository of moral, political, epistemic or cultural variation a cosmopolitan vision of global justice might seek to promote. Thus, we argued that Legal Pluralism’s method did not count against universal norms in the ways it claimed, in large part because it overvalued law. This point warrants emphasis. We do not argue that universal norms always solve the problems we point to across the board, which would be patently absurd. Instead, we mean to reverse the argumentative onus and place the burden onto the prescriptive account of Global Legal Pluralism, insisting that just managing whatever we consider to be law globally seems overly deferential to law. Our brief histories were, in the grand scheme of things, relatively superficial attempts to “scratch the surface” to see what lies beneath law. Having peered below the surface very briefly, we sought to point out how Legal Pluralism was not necessarily counter-hegemonic, since for a large set of what would constitute law, the hegemon had beat Legal Pluralism to the punch by imposing the law in the first place. Consequently, our aim was to warn that in prescriptive guise, the concept risked entrenching unjust norms.

We were, of course, conscious that history would never be able to “distinguish this superficial transplantation of domestic criminal law into the international realm, from potentially legitimate and useful reliance on national doctrines,” as Neha Jain rightly points out. Instead, we argued that the history of much of the world’s criminal law doctrine, both national and international, should undermine confidence that Legal Pluralism was necessarily respectful of genuine cultural variation, such that it could ground some concept of justice. Our first example of Argentine criminal law procedure operated as a null hypothesis where, by “scratching the surface,” we quickly found evidence of autonomous domestic ownership of and influence over criminal law doctrine. But in all our other examples, we found nothing similar. Far from stating that there was no congruence between local values and criminal law doctrine in any of these states, our argument was merely that these histories suggest real reason for caution against an idea that Legal Pluralism is, without more, worthy of veneration. We also felt that generic attempts to circumscribe Legal Pluralism’s over-enthusiasm for law, perhaps by citing human rights as an exception, came too late in the day because too much was already smuggled in through the initial deference to whatever law might be at the descriptive stage.

To develop this point, let me begin by recounting the descriptive and prescriptive variants of Legal Pluralism, since Global Legal Pluralism depends on both. Initially, Legal Pluralism was purely descriptive, tracing its origins to anthropological inquiries into the interactions between displaced social orders and formal colonial law. To the extent that the field drew on normative ideas within this descriptive mode, the need for this engagement largely grew out of challenges to methodology; i.e. objections to what should figure as “law” within the wider sociological inquiry. I circle back to this difficulty with defining law momentarily, since I have come to believe that it must be most acute in international criminal justice. For now, I again point to a major prescriptive shift for Legal Pluralism, where many scholars have begun to argue that diversity of social phenomena we are prepared to call law is not only empirically observable, but that this state of affairs is normatively desirable for the world. Global Legal Pluralism necessarily adopts both elements, first accepting a wide array of norms as constituting law, then recommending various institutional and procedural mechanisms for managing their interface. The caricature of Legal Pluralism the article offers was an attempt to hive off some of the most difficult problems at the descriptive stage, to highlight conceptual concerns with the transition from a descriptive to a prescriptive mode.

To explain this, let me start by agreeing wholeheartedly with Mireille Delmas-Marty’s eloquent statement that “choosing an exclusively state-centric perspective while the world is moving, the authors risk confining themselves to a state-centric, modern representation of LP which identifies with the rights of the state and makes the concept necessarily oxymoronic.” A theory of Legal Pluralism focused on state law alone would be oxymoronic. As our essay highlighted, “an over-emphasis on domestic criminal doctrine is anathema to true pluralism, whose very program involves looking beyond positivistic state-centered law.” Nevertheless, focusing on a segment of a field to elucidate conceptual concerns strikes me as entirely defensible. In our piece, we focused our analysis on state-centered criminal law in an attempt to avoid the wider jurisprudential problem involved in deciding what constitutes law at all. As Brian Tamanaha and many others have pointed out, that problem is a perennial thorn in Legal Pluralism’s side,[2] so we sought to bypass the conceptual impasse by criticizing a segment of the legal we believed was unambiguously so. I have since come to think that the positivistic assumption that informed this method was unjustifiable on our part, but in ways that radically strengthen our argument not detract from it.

Understandably, the rules crafted to bring about the atrocities international criminal justice seeks to address are the very subject matter legal theorists use to debate the nature of law. Since completing the paper, it has dawned on me that whether Nazi law was law at all is the paradigmatic debate for a large segment of jurisprudence; indeed the question goes to the heart of the relationship between law and morality and therefore operates as something of an acid test for so many aspects of legal theory. To cite what is probably the most celebrated example (in the Anglophone tradition), the Hart/Fuller debate is a long and in places heated dispute between the positivist tradition that would see law as identified through social facts quite apart from its moral value, and a natural law tradition that was shocked by the positivists’ willingness to confer normativity on a set of legislative enactments in Nazi Germany that were clearly morally perverse.[3] In many respects, the histories we discuss in the paper replicate these dilemmas. It stands to reason, therefore, that much of what we treat as law in the article might not be at all. This thought strikes me as very significant: it suggests that international criminal justice is not just a pleasant illustration of the normative interactions Global Legal Pluralism seeks to understand and manage. The field is at the heart of what Global Legal Pluralism means.

So, let me circle back to our caricature, showing how the natural law critique of our positivistic assumption only magnifies the concerns we raise. In our example of the inchoate crime of association de malfaiteurs in the Democratic Republic of Congo (see here, pp 33-41), we sought out a modern illustration of abhorrent criminal law doctrine in national systems comparable to the law “that allowed Joseph Stalin to sign 3,167 judicially-imposed death sentences in a single day, and Adolf Hitler to make being Jewish a criminal offence.” Our assumption, which I now think is highly disputable, was that this forcibly imposed inchoate crime of French then Belgian origins was unequivocally law; it survived the sieving off of law from religious, moral and social norms on the one hand, while distinguishing itself from the full range of non-obligatory propositions on the other. Once parsed out in this way, association de malfaiteurs was a law that both descriptive and descriptive theories of Legal Pluralism had to take seriously. Our project was to question whether Legal Pluralism should take it seriously at all, based only on its ability to pass this formalistic test. We used the apparent misalignment between local values and legal doctrine as our foil.

But Fuller, I suspect, would have doubted that association de malfaiteurs was law at all, then rebuked our positivistic attempt to avoid thorny jurisprudential problems as failed. But if our caricature fails for these reasons, it does so in ways that only galvanize our deeper point, namely, that “doctrinal pluralism is unsafe as a measure of diverse values and interests in the international community”. Perhaps Legal Pluralism is only about managing just law, such that the concept is instantly insulated from our criticism, but I see no evidence of this position in the literature with which I am familiar, and it would mark a sea-change for thinking about these problems. Then, to follow this jurisprudential line one step further in abstraction, the question becomes what the relationship is between Legal Pluralism and Justice. And here too, I now see this theme as a central but tacit pre-occupation in our paper as well as the literature more broadly. It is this unstated concern for justice, for instance, that leads scholars like Martti Koskenniemi to warn that Legal Pluralism “ceases to pose demands on the world;”[4] and Boaventura de Sousa Santos to assert that “there is nothing inherently good, progressive, or emancipatory about Legal Pluralism.”[5]

Justice is also useful in responding to criticisms based on the Rule of Law. In employing a Rule of Law frame, Kevin Davis’ excellent and thought-provoking critique of our article argues that “[d]octrines that confirm to people’s expectations are desirable, all else being equal, because they contribute to legal certainty and avoid situations that are tantamount to ex post facto lawmaking.” While there is certainly weight to this criticism, I am not sure how it squares with other principles espoused in the Rule of Law. As Waldron points out, avoiding contradictions in the law is also one of Fuller’s eight elements in the internal morality of law, and others like Dicey viewed legal equality as indispensable too.[6] Universality appears better able to achieve these competing values. But more fundamentally, as critical traditions from Feminisim to Marxism teach us, Rule of Law arguments are all vulnerable to deeper normative commitments that take some notion(s) of justice as the paramount goal. To offer an illustration from our paper, even if we do assign legal certainty primacy as an Rule of Law value, I am doubtful that it could ever ground a norm like association de malfaiteurs in the Congo. I hold this view since a norm imposed by force as part of a brutal campaign of subjugation and plunder, which operates to inhibit political participation and freedom of expression now, seems plainly unjust.

Markus Dubber’s response takes us down a slightly different track on this justice path, where he argues that “[p]luralistic international criminal law thus becomes international criminal law kind and gentle enough to mollify its protagonists’ latent concerns about its apparent lack of legitimacy”, and then later that, “[i]ncapable of facing its legitimacy challenge head-on, international criminal law instead makes do with professions of concern about ‘pluralism’.” These types of normative concerns are slightly different to those that animated our paper, but they also play off the relationship between law and a conception of justice. So, while I view Legal Pluralism as a helpful concept to ward off “the colonial contrived superiority of European law” and agree with Sasha Greenawalt that, descriptively speaking, Legal Pluralism is inherent, I remain convinced that history is a useful mechanism to illustrate the concept’s shortcomings as a guarantor of justice. I have also become convinced that, far from raising questions that are peripheral to Global Legal Pluralism, international criminal justice poses problems at the concept’s very heart.

I am so thankful for all of the excellent criticism we have received, which has enriched my thinking considerably. I hope that some of the foregoing is useful to others as they grapple with problems of law in the global order.

[1] James (Sákéj) Youngblood Henderson, Postcolonial Indigenous Legal Consciousness, 1 Indig. Law J., 2 (2002), http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/ilj/article/download/27710 (last visited Apr 19, 2018).

[2] Brian Z. Tamanaha, Understanding Legal Pluralism: Past to Present, Local to Global, 30 Sydney L. Rev. 375, 375 (2008).

[3] H. L. A. Hart, Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals, 71 Harv. Law Rev. 593–629 (1958); Lon L. Fuller, Positivism and Fidelity to Law: A Reply to Professor Hart, 71 Harv. Law Rev. 630–672 (1958).

[4] Martti Koskenniemi, The Fate of Public International Law: Between Technique and Politics, 70 Mod. L. Rev. 1, 23 (2007).

[5] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Toward a New Legal Common Sense: Law, Globalization, and Emancipation 89 (2002).

[6] Jeremy Waldron, Legal Pluralism and the Contrast Between Hart’s Jurisprudence and Fuller’s, in The Hart-Fuller Debate in the Twenty-First Century (Peter Cane ed., 2010).

Asad Kiyani is an Assistant Professor at Victoria Law School. He is a recipient of the 2017 Antonio Cassese Prize for International Criminal Law Studies for his article Group-Based Differentiation and Local Repression: The Custom and Curse of Selectivity.

One of the many pleasures of developing The Ahistoricism of Legal Pluralism in International Criminal Law has been the opportunity to engage with the work of leading scholars in international criminal law, legal pluralism, and comparative law. In an academic environment that increasingly turns on metrics and particular forms of scholarship and productivity, it is incredibly generous of all of the participants in our mini-symposium to share their thoughts. It represents the best of the tradition of academic engagement that they have taken the time to comment (and many have done so on earlier drafts as well). I should also thank James for being such an excellent partner on this project; I have benefited from his advice on my doctoral work, and it was a pleasure to join him as co-author here. It’s fair to say we both learned a terrific amount over the course of this project, and I enjoyed it immensely.

In what follows, I offer three overlapping responses, addressing whether historicism as a concept is relevant to pluralism in ICL today; whether the examples we study overemphasize certain values and under appreciate others; and finally, what direction the study of pluralism in international criminal law might also take us.

The insights graciously offered by Alexander Greenawalt and Paul Berman, who have written extensively and thoughtfully on pluralism in ICL, and pluralism more broadly, overlaps to an extent with Neha Jain’s comments. Put broadly, the three query whether our work impacts pluralist scholarship (Berman wonders whether ahistoricism as an analytic is relevant to the work of contemporary international legal pluralists), and whether there is a more pragmatic justification for pluralism that is important in its own right even if it does not equate to the idea of ‘value pluralism’.

As a starting point, it should be noted that the umbrella-type frameworks of Drumbl, Greenawalt, and van Sliedregt (amongst others) see pluralism as a feature of a legal structure that allows us to add in different laws and norms around the settled ‘core’ of ICL. Where gaps present themselves, we can find our answers in domestic law, either iteratively by reference to specific rules in particular instances, or comprehensively, by developing an international position on the basis of these surveys. But the questions of what is ‘core’ and how it came to be so are as important as the questions about identifying what should be filled in around that core and how. Part of our work then is to explain and critique this development of this ‘core’; that is ahistoricism coming to bear on pluralism.

The main thrust of this commentary is that our critique is overstated not because it misapprehends the work of legal pluralists, but because our focus on critiquing the aspirational ephemerality of ‘pluralism’ overlooks somewhat different rationales for incorporating domestic rules into ICL. In short, those rules offer something other than ‘value pluralism’ that is of importance: rules that have been tested in (and held up in) various legal systems, and thereby demonstrated their durability and relevance for international law. I will deal with this critique further in the next section, but note here that while such functionalism is not inherently flawed, it may also represent a particular vision of pluralism that is shallower and formalist. That vision is susceptible to papering over the underlying histories that may either be constrictive of the development of ICL, or that give lie to the claim of benefit to be derived.

One of the primary ways in which pluralists see benefits deriving from preserving legal diversity is the idea that it allows for multiple possible rules to be tested in multiple possible systems (a point Berman makes in his work on Global Legal Pluralism, and which Greenawalt cites). This is the laboratory idea: that rules can experimented with in the laboratory of global legal systems, and the testing reveals what rules are appropriate either as universal norms or in specific but circumscribed conditions. What the paper contests is  not the idea that experimentation is possible, or that diversity is valuable, but that when put into practice the experimentation rationale often exhibits an indifference to sources and an indifference to the context in which these rules are implanted. Exposing the colonial history of so many domestic criminal systems says something about both the context of the law, but even more fundamentally something about the idea that there is meaningful diversity being tested.

As Jain points out, the literature on legal transplants is already highly sensitive to the context in which facially similar rules are applied and develop over time, in ways that might serve to reflect local needs and perhaps even local values. From our point of view, this sensitivity to context and history is often absent when engaging in such exercises in ICL. There, the determinative factor often seems to be whether the rule is present, without regard to how it is embedded, even though it is the system along with the rule itself that conditions the outcome of the experimentation. For all the talk of laboratory testing, very little attention is paid to the experiment itself: how the law was designed, what it was designed to do, and what effect it has had. Instead, when the ‘experimentation’ rationale is put into practice, the Darwinian persistence of a law is taken as proof of its success and therefore relevance to international tribunals. To the extent that these concepts of a legal core and legal experimentation are central to explanations of pluralism in ICL, then ahistoricism is also relevant.

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While Berman wonders if our historical enquiries are relevant to the present, it is also suggested that perhaps we take our historical analysis too far. For example, what of complementarity, Greenawalt asks? Should DRC’s legal history disqualify it from accessing complementarity at the ICC? There is no absolute answer to be offered he says, and is wary that we might propose such (presumably in part because this would be what Kevin Davis describes as a pedigree-based distinction). His concern is further important to us because of the danger that our historical analysis will be used to justify the accessibility of complementarity procedures (and therefore an affirmation of sovereignty) to only Western states whose domestic systems procedurally and substantively replicate international ones. This marginalization of Third World states and their legal agency would seem to run against what Jain rightly identifies as our concern with ICL’s continuing exclusion of the Global South as a norm-generator.

We are not of the view that we have fully resolved the balancing exercise Greenawalt rightly says needs to be engaged when decisions are being made about whether to permit or utilize domestic laws instead of international ones. However, that balancing exercise needs to be more attendant to the experimentation that elsewhere seems to justify greater pluralism. When that experimentation process — i.e. the practice of the domestic law —  reveals extensive state-sourced violence (say through association de malfeiteurs in DRC), those factors ought to be considered.

Is this too obvious? Are the examples we rely upon extreme because they express concern about the remote possibility that obvious rights violations might somehow be tolerated in ICL under the guise of pluralism (recast here as an extreme relativism)? Greenawalt suggests that the examples we focus on shed little light because they clearly offend universal values. Davis takes a different tack, suggesting in his intriguing commentary that our suspicion of local law that is based on the substantive values they (fail to) uphold ignores extremely important factors. We overemphasize the values these local laws offend he says, rather than appreciate the principles they support, and in particular we overlook core rule of law precepts.

Davis suggests our pessimism leads to an assessment of national laws that is overly onerous, and queries whether any national law would pass muster from our view. He is concerned with our focus on doctrinal pedigree, which leads to national laws being suspect on their origin (often colonial), evolution (often undemocratic), or application (repressive). This, he says, “is a stringent test, probably too stringent.”

This is a problem in particular because in his view we overlook the rule of law values that accrue when the law is predictable and stable. Disrupting local norms on the basis of international standards represents its own form of imperialism we would do well to shy away from. He suggests that in critiquing contemporary international lawmaking, we bypass a more obvious answer – representative democracy – that might assuage our concerns about the legitimacy of local laws and, by extension, pluralist methodology. We share some of the concerns raised by Davis, but for slightly different reasons which leads to important and different conclusions.

First, as important as predictability and stability may be, international tribunals arguably have a special obligation to not validate illiberal laws under the umbrella of pluralism, complementarity or some other diversity-based argument given the centrality of international human rights norms to their functioning. It is worth noting then, in response to the suggestion of several of our helpful interlocutors that ICL would not tolerate such obvious rights violations and that we are building a case against a problem that does not exist, that the intersection of competing visions of fundamental rights remains unresolved in both national and international criminal contexts.

Whether it be association de malfeiteurs, the conditions of detention of international criminals (including the estimated 10,000 who died while awaiting trial in Rwanda), the culpability of child soldiers, the difference in punishment that may attach to those tried in the Hague versus their collaborators tried in national courts, or how the Akayesu definition of sexual violence was later constricted by the ICTY’s use of comparative analyses of national law, it remains the case that international criminal law struggles to respond to the thorny questions that arise in defining human rights norms.

On that point, it is worth raising the question of universality again (and repeating a reply in a slightly different register): that the examples we attend to are clearly infringements of universal values, and thus we are arguing against no one in particular. Left unaddressed here though is that the sense of what is a universal norm to be protected remains deeply contested, as we show through our analysis of the Draft Code of Crimes Against Peace and Security of Mankind, and with the Apartheid Convention and indeed in the important regional variation between human rights regimes.  Contestation remains on fundamental issues, and the history of human rights doctrine in the post-war era resists the triumphalism often associated with human rights. There is an inextricable historical link to power associated with the concept of universality, and pluralist schemas that seek to declare and then build around those universals must reckon with those histories and dynamics as well.

Second, as suggested earlier, local correspondence — whether it be to cultural values or the expectations of a polity — necessarily says nothing about the supposed twin pragmatic benefits of pluralism that concern themselves with whether local law is suitable as part of international law. The first of these is the idea that thorny questions of international criminal law may be resolved through experimentation with a variety of different possible solutions that are offered by diverse local legal regimes; the second is that we can develop universalist international law by surveying national regimes and identifying nodes of commonality the diverse legal cultures have independently struck upon. Our position is that even where these regimes correspond with local values or expectations, the underlying justificatory factor of diversity may be absent simply because the vectors of history and legal imperialism are such that these various national regimes are largely duplicative of one another and their Angle-European origins. Thus both experimentation and justification on the basis of independent agreement lose resonance given the erasure of diversity that predates contemporary pluralist moves.

Davis further suggests that a consequence of our stringent test is that it leads inexorably towards a demand for international drafting from first principles, which is a process that is likely to be deeply unsatisfactory to all. We agree that such a process would be imperfect, and recognize in particular the inherent imbalances in negotiation and drafting that often replicate international power imbalances . However, without abandoning the possibility of an inclusive, equal negotiating process, we note that there are other possible approaches.

One episode that is missing from our published article in the American Journal of Comparative Law, but included in the longer draft available on SSRN (which was shared with all our invited commentators), is the development of more liberal criminal procedure code in Argentina over an extended period of time. That federal code borrowed from multiple legal systems, including a quite important influence from the criminal procedure code of Cordoba province. Conscious efforts to liberalize Argentine procedure involved legislators setting an agenda and legal experts providing advice as to how to reshape the federal code, and the eventual dispersion of this code as a model for other Latin American countries who similarly sought to liberalize their criminal procedure. This fusion of legal principles, and deliberate consideration and adoption, neither demands rewriting the law from scratch (as Davis suggests is a necessary corollary of our approach) nor does it forgo the important principles Davis articulates in his reflection: that there is value in a law that is stable but not ossified, and which adheres to the expectations of those it binds. In this respect, we find common ground with Davis and so many of our other thoughtful and generous interlocutors from which to argue for a more inclusive pluralism.

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Where then does the study of pluralism in ICL take us? For Dubber, studying pluralism is in part a way to reflect on the legitimacy of ICL: “Pluralistic international criminal law thus become international criminal law kind and gentle enough to mollify its protagonists’ latent concerns about its apparent lack of legitimacy.” Similarly, Mireille Delmas-Marty’s typically profound reflections highlight the ambivalence of pluralist approaches as both resistance and reconciliation.

The propriety of the concern arises first with the very real problem that, per Dubber, ICL purports to judge individuals based on the questionable premise that it is only “their capacity for autonomy, or self-government” that is relevant, “rather than their place on some status hierarchy”. It is compounded by a second insight, that ICL is not law per se, but really a system of policing in the sense of coercive and discretionary governance that adjudicates over and punishes the morally inferior (if not evil) wrongdoers who commit international crimes. The turn to pluralism, Dubber suggests, recognizes and is primarily a mode for managing this legitimacy deficit by softening the Western imperialist legacy of ICL by infusing it with local, values.

Of great interest here is that central debates about how to manage pluralism and complementarity and related diversity-focused concepts only sharpen the hegemonic origins of much of international criminal law. It is only when there is a question of incorporating the law of a non-Western state that the issue becomes particularly thorny, given that first there is a clear familiarity between Western domestic and international law, and that most of the attention of international criminal tribunals is directed at non-Western states.

But we do not need pluralism to tell us that the practice of international criminal law seems imbalanced in the legitimacy-threatening sense that Dubber describes; that story can be told through critical reflections that focus on the hypocrisy of international criminal practice. That being said, understanding ICL as a system of coercive discretionary governance may help us recognize the limits of pluralism in ICL, where the idea of ‘legal’ pluralism seemingly presupposes a structure of largely unified and hierarchical formal law of the state or of international tribunals. What this concept of legal pluralism leads to – and I do not claim that Delmas-Marty endorses this outcome – is the exclusion of non-state legal orders from  the realm of possible responses to international crime. She rightly warns that our historical analysis risks suggesting that legal pluralism must be state-centric.

One of the concerns with our paper, and with other approaches to legal pluralism in ICL, is the difficulty with finding spaces for non-state law. Though criminal law is often conceptualized as necessarily state-sourced, the context of transitional justice suggests that some flexibility may be needed: it is not necessarily the case that the law to be applied in respect of international crime be ‘criminal law’ per se. I do not propose to carve out that space at this juncture, but only to note that we are alive to those concerns. When we refer to legal pluralism’s descriptive origins (in contrast to more prescriptive contemporary modes), it is precisely that history of legal pluralism to which we refer: the history of Sally Engle Merry and John Griffiths and the classical sense of legal pluralism as identifying and describing non-state normative orders as ‘legal’.

Rather than carve out that space, let me take what space remains and sketch out what I argue in a work-in-progress is a fundamental limit on the possibility of non-state law becoming part of pluralism in ICL. I have argued elsewhere that the selectivity problem of international criminal tribunals is most acute in respect of the partiality shown within conflicts, where only  certain political actors are prosecuted, and not others, even though multiple parties are responsible for comparably grave crimes. This political-prosecutorial alignment is a function of the gatekeeper role played by local political authorities in respect of international criminal prosecutions: state authorities control access to witnesses and evidence, and can thus force tribunals to make compromises on which cases to pursue.

In so far as the legal norms to be applied are part of the tacit arrangement that permits international tribunal involvement without threatening the current arrangements of domestic political power, non-state law finds itself on the outside looking in. In several of the conflicts that international criminal tribunals seek to exercise jurisdiction, part of what is at stake is the modes by which competing parties are to be governed. Should the state be built in the Western, liberal, enlightenment model that Dubber suggests attends to international criminal law? Or should there be a prioritizing of customary non-state legal orders and traditions?   For state authorities to defer to non-state legal orders as a means of response to international crimes would arguably translate into a recognition that its political opponents have some political legitimacy. If international criminal law is not the end of political conflict, but only its continuation in a slightly more decorous forum, then such concessions in the legal sphere may well amount to concessions in (and inflammations of) the underlying conflict as well.

In this light, accepting pluralism in its classical sense, as recognizing non-state legal orders as valid normative structures that have salience in contemporary states, requires not that scholars be willing to challenge the histories of international law, but that states themselves be willing to challenge their own histories – to move beyond the ahistorical narratives of conflict that they often promote – in order to give effect to the aspirational qualities that animate international criminal law and practice. Ahistoricism remains germane.

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I thank again James for his collaboration on this extensive project over the last several years, and our extremely insightful commentators – Mireille Delmas-Marty, Paul Berman, Neha Jain, Alexander Greenawalt, Markus Dubber and Kevin Davis — whose analyses have provoked much reflection. It has been a privilege to engage with all of their ideas.

– AGK

Alexander K. A. Greenawalt is a Professor of Law at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. His research focuses on criminal law, international law, and the laws of war.

I am grateful to James Stewart for inviting me to participate in this symposium on the provocative, deeply researched, and illuminating article that he and Asad Kiyani have authored. I have enjoyed engaging Stewart’s work over the years—including in a recent article on complicity which greatly benefitted from his writings—and I look forward to reading more of Kiyani’s work.

Let me start by identifying some points of agreement. I share the authors’ conviction that it is worth looking for right answers in criminal law, and I agree that those answers can transcend sometimes superficial doctrinal differences among legal systems (indeed, my above-linked article on complicity advances precisely such a claim). I also agree that it is misguided to romanticize difference for the sake of difference and that one must avoid the casual assumption that national criminal laws always have claim to deep cultural authenticity within the societies they regulate.

As Stewart and Kiyani note, I have used the word “pluralism” to defend a particular approach to international criminal law (“ICL”). Stewart and Kiyani are skeptical about pluralist approaches to ICL, but I struggled when reading their article to understand how exactly their position might impact my own, or indeed the actual practice of ICL. In part, this is because I find their account of pluralism somewhat elusive. Sometimes the authors seem to suggest that pluralism means blind deference to every doctrine of domestic criminal law no matter how oppressive. Elsewhere (among other approaches), they associate pluralism with a method by which ICL might arrive at consensus international standards—namely, by embracing rules derived from national criminal law that reflect a “real degree of inclusive, plural, cosmopolitan values” and are “doctrinally plural within a diverse, conflicting, sometimes inter-penetrating system of criminal law.” I am not aware of any scholar who has advanced the first position and the second claim is not one that I would associate with pluralism in the sense that I have used the term, although it does resemble a standard methodology embraced by international criminal tribunals attempting (sometimes misleadingly as the authors observe) to marshal support for universalist claims about the content of ICL.

I am curious, as well, about how exactly Stewart and Kiyani’s broad rejection of pluralism informs the actual practice of international criminal justice institutions. Take, for instance, the International Criminal Court’s (“ICC”) complementarity requirement which sometimes requires the Court to defer its jurisdiction in favor of criminal justice at the national level. Suppose the ICC is pursuing a suspect in the Democratic Republic Congo (“DRC”) who is being investigated at the national level for the same conduct. Do the authors believe that complementarity can or should apply in a case like that, or should the systemic, historically rooted deficiencies they identify in the DRC’s criminal law categorically preclude deference in all cases? Or perhaps complementarity itself should be abandoned because it inherently introduces the problems of pluralism that the authors explore? How then should a global system of ICL proceed if it rejects domestic prosecutions of international crimes?

The most obvious solution I can glean from Stewart and Kiyani’s article is that the world must coalesce around a single, best, cross-cultural and universal approach to all questions of criminal law and procedure, one that is devoid of power politics or cultural bias. If the world can achieve that, then I agree that the normative defense of pluralism becomes quite unconvincing indeed. But if that is the claim, then the authors must establish far more—and overcome far greater hurdles—than they do in this article.

For example, even if the world were to coalesce around the unitary theory of perpetration that the authors advocate (rejecting formally differentiated modes of criminally participation) I don’t see how the general choice of a unitary versus differentiated model is especially important in comparison to the host of other choices affecting guilt, innocence, and degrees of culpability that must be decided upon under either model.

Perhaps, however, one should read Stewart and Kiyani to advance a more modest claim that universalism is something to work for, that some universal answers are accessible, and that the blind embrace of pluralism is both threatening to this project and harmful given the colonial origins and distortions evident in many criminal law systems. If that is the claim, then I agree with the central thrust of the argument, but my own defense of pluralism does not proceed from the assumption that national criminal law demands blind deference or that it necessarily has some claim to deep cultural authenticity. To me, the central question is not one of universalism versus pluralism, but of how to manage the pluralism that unavoidably has accompanied the establishment of ICL. I also believe that my own framework accommodates many of the concerns that the authors raise, and so I will attempt in the remainder of this post to sketch out some of my own thoughts on this issue and attempt to see how they may accommodate at least of some of the concerns raised by Stewart and Kiyani.

I begin with the fact that there is variety in the criminal law. I agree (even outside the colonial context) that variety need not have any deep cultural basis. While differences among states may sometimes reflect important cultural fault lines, they are just as likely to reflect arbitrary, and sometimes pernicious, historical vestiges or the influence of judicial interpretation.

International law, in its current state, is hardly agnostic about this diversity. The body of international law that most broadly regulates these choices is international human rights law (“IHRL”). Many of the examples that Stewart and Kiyani invoke—judicial bias after World War I, restrictions on freedom of association, anti-blasphemy laws—reflect straightforward human rights violations. As a matter of IHRL (as the authors themselves acknowledge), these examples already offend universal values.

ICL, by contrast, presents only a limited intervention by international law into matters of criminal law. ICL evolved, in my view, not to harmonize national approaches to criminal law, or even to define and regulate uniquely “international” offenses in some qualitative sense, but instead to enable institutional interventions that counteract unique obstacles to the prosecution of certain especially grave offenses. The point of prosecuting Holocaust crimes at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, for example, was not to reject German criminal law’s general judgments about how to define and assign liability for murder in ordinary cases. The point was to counteract and ensure accountability for the specific ways in which Nazi Germany had made an exception to those judgments by converting the state into a system of domestically authorized mass extermination. I believe that ICL speaks the most strongly when it works to justify and define the scope of such interventions, and it speaks more tentatively (although not entirely without authority) when it addresses more general questions about what it means to be a criminal.

How does this way of looking at things interact with Stewart and Kiyani’s specific claims? In previous work I have explored the example of the Erdemović case at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (“ICTY”) involving a soldier who was forced under threat of death to participate in a firing line that massacred Bosnian Muslim civilians.   The ICTY Appeals Chamber rejected the defense on (I believe unpersuasive) policy grounds, notwithstanding the unresolved nature of the question under international law and the fact that many states, including all the republics of the former Yugoslavia, take a more permissive approach to duress.

I do not know whether Stewart and Kiyani have access to an optimal, universalist approach to duress. My position is that the ICTY should have looked to Bosnian law under the circumstances. In advancing this argument, I do not assume that the Bosnian criminal code reflects a deeply embedded and culturally specific approach to duress. Rather the Bosnian law reflects a fairly standard civil law approach that the state inherited from its prior membership in communist Yugoslavia. I think that the law of duress presents unavoidably hard questions, that all the dominant legal approaches to the issue are problematic in some respects, and that the Bosnian law falls within a range of reasonable disagreement that neither offends core human rights value nor the specific purposes of ICL. In a case like that, I don’t think that ICL has a strong interest in overriding the local law to deprive the accused of a defense which his society affords to other similarly situated persons. But even if one disagrees with that specific conclusion, the same problem arises in other guises. Suppose that the Bosnia’s own courts were prosecuting Erdemović for international crimes. Must those courts also prefer the ICTY’s approach to duress over their own? And what about ordinary domestic prosecutions for non-international crimes? Wherever one draws the line, the basic problem remains: absent universal, global agreement on how to handle duress, some defendants must be treated differently from others based on perhaps arbitrary, non-culpability driven reasons. Similar issues arise with respect to other standards of responsibility, principles of sentencing and so forth. Must ICL take an absolute position on every one of these questions, no matter how tangential the doctrinal issue is to ICL’s core mission?

At the same time, I agree (and have argued) that is desirable to have a single, comprehensive set of ICL rules that are available for use by a global court like the ICC and in other contexts where reliance on domestic legal principles proves problematic or undesirable. There are many reasons to favor this restult, including problems that Stewart and Kiyani explore as well as concerns having to do with clarity and administrability. But I do not think that those reasons exhaust all the procedural contexts in which ICL finds itself enforced. In the end, implementation of ICL involves a number of situation-specific considerations that cannot be resolved by broad appeals to either universalism or pluralism. Instead, there are a balance of factors to consider. Stewart and Kiyani convincingly elucidate some important factors that may sometimes arise. But they do not, in my view, eliminate the need for such balancing.

Kevin E. Davis is the Beller Family Professor of Business Law at New York University School of Law. His current research is focused on contract law, anticorruption law, and the general relationship between law and economic development.

Does international criminal law conform to local values? How can we tell? Why should we care? In their fascinating and illuminating article, The Ahistoricism of Legal Pluralism in International Criminal Law, James Stewart and Asad Kiyani focus on the first of these three questions. Inevitably though they end up addressing the other two questions as well. I say “inevitably” because it would be impossible for them to answer the first question about conformity without answering the methodological question of how to identify it, at least implicitly. And to choose among the variety of ways of assessing conformity they have to determine the purpose of the assessment, again, if only implicitly.

Stewart and Kiyani’s main interest is in debunking the view that doctrines drawn from national criminal laws necessarily conform to local values. The promised payoff is insight into the important issue of whether international criminal law ought to be pluralistic or universal — or as I prefer to put it, should it be uniform or not? They seem to believe that their debunking exercise undermines the case for non-uniform approaches. However, this only follows if a) they have an accurate test for conformity with local values and b), the case for a non-uniform international criminal regime depends in a significant way on the results of that test.

The way that Stewart and Kiyani test for conformity suggests they believe that the main justification for non-uniform approach to international criminal law is political legitimacy. I believe they are mistaken about what political legitimacy demands in this context. I also believe they neglect at least two other plausible justifications for a non-uniform regime: respect for individuals’ rights to be governed by familiar doctrines and effectiveness. For all these reasons I think that Stewart and Kiyani’s historical analysis does less damage to the case for non-uniform international criminal law than they make out. Let me explain.

Political legitimacy

The Ahistoricism of Legal Pluralism in International Criminal Law is organized around a series of case studies that examine whether various criminal law doctrines do or do not conform to local values. In each of the negative cases the reasons for concluding that there is a lack of conformity are slightly different. In the Democratic Republic of Congo the problem is that the colonial doctrine has remained in force without being amended by any local actors. In Pakistan the concern is that local amendments to a colonial doctrine were made by repressive dictators. Etc.

Curiously, nowhere do they test for conformity by referring to direct observations of local values. Stewart and Kiyani could have tried to ascertain the amount of popular support for individual doctrines by examining, say, survey data or commentary in the popular press. It is unclear why they eschew this seemingly obvious approach.

Instead, Stewart and Kiyani focus on assessing the pedigree of the doctrines. When a doctrine is damned it is because: it was originally drafted by a colonial power; if it was revised by local actors they were working at the behest of an un-democratic government or for some other reason failed ensure popular participation in the lawmaking process; or, it has been used, either locally or elsewhere, either as a tool of repression or in a partial fashion.

This is a stringent test, probably too stringent. Given the prevalence of legal transplantation and legislation by non-participatory, un-democratic or repressive regimes, most national criminal law doctrines seem likely to fail. More importantly for their ultimate argument, I believe that even the universalistic doctrines Stewart and Kiyani seem to favor would shrivel under this kind of scrutiny. What international drafting process is likely to ensure participation from all affected people, without intermediation by undemocratic or even repressive governments?

Focusing on whether the formulation of a doctrine involved democratically elected leaders and public participation seems to be a way of determining whether the doctrine in question is politically legitimate. If that is the goal then I think Stewart and Kiyani go astray because they underestimate both the costs of participation and the appeal of an alternative method of taking into account the views of the relevant public, namely, representative government. Drafting legislation from scratch and in full view of the public is a time-consuming exercise whose results may well leave everyone unsatisfied. Participation by all affected individuals is unrealistic, unnecessary and inefficient. Representative government, meaning participation by officials who are accountable to the people, may be sufficient to ensure that the public’s views are respected, and is far less costly.

Civil rights

Another element of Stewart and Kiyani’s test for whether a doctrine conforms to local values is whether it has been used to facilitate repression. That is what I take from their suggestion that the doctrine of association de malfaiteurs fails to conform to local values in France—where it originated—because it has been used repressively against people suspected of terrorism.

By suggesting that even contemporary French criminal law might be a problematic source for international criminal law, Stewart and Kiyani shift the debate away from political legitimacy to a new terrain, individual civil rights. They clearly believe that a test which excludes doctrines that violate civil rights will tend to be biased in favor of universalistic doctrines.

Stewart and Kiyani neglect a countervailing factor though: a non-uniform approach may result in adoption of doctrines that conform to local expectations, assuming that exposure tends to breed familiarity. When it comes to legal doctrine, familiarity is intrinsically desirable, even if, as Stewart and Kiyani might point out, it can also breed contempt. Doctrines that conform to people’s expectations are desirable, all else being equal, because they contribute to legal certainty and avoid situations that are tantamount to ex post facto lawmaking.

Effectiveness

Finally, Stewart and Kiyani neglect another type of justification that might weigh in favor of a non-uniform approach to international criminal law: effectiveness. Suppose the effectiveness of criminal law doctrines varies depending on the circumstances. For example, harsh punishment for inchoate offenses might be reasonable in a society where evidence of completed offences is difficult to obtain, but less reasonable where evidence is more accessible. Similarly, a law against blasphemy might be reasonable in a society riven by religious tensions, but unacceptable in a society where religious toleration is better entrenched. In other words, different doctrines might be optimal in different circumstances. A non-uniform approach to international criminal law can accommodate this kind of diversity. Note that if effectiveness is the primary concern the critical issue will not be whether a given doctrine conforms to local values, but rather whether it fits local conditions, which is a slightly different test.

I develop this argument in favor of non-uniform “contextualist” approaches to lawmaking at greater length elsewhere, including in my writing about transnational – and international – anti-corruption law.[1]

Conclusion

For all these reasons, tracing the tainted history of national criminal law doctrines is an interesting and valuable exercise but does not provide compelling reasons to reject non-uniform approaches to international criminal law.

[1] See Legal Universalism: Persistent Objections, 60 University of Toronto Law Journal 537 (2010) and Between Impunity and Imperialism: Rethinking Transnational Anti-Corruption Law (forthcoming).

Mireille Delmas-Marty is the Professor of Comparative Legal Studies and Internationalisation of Law at the Collége de France. She is the author of Ordering Pluralism, A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Transnational Legal World (Hart, 2009) and Towards a Truly Common Law – Europe As a Laboratory for Legal Pluralism (CUP, 2002).

I fully agree with the starting point: « International criminal law is legally plural, not a single unified body of norms ». ICL is an excellent example to illustrate what is called “Legal Pluralism” (LP), especially when considering « the complex dance between international law and domestic criminal law ». I also agree with the authors’ insight that this dance “takes place on at least five levels: (1) within national courts, trials involving international crimes often employ their own local criminal law standards rather than the international law equivalent; (2) international courts sometimes follow a particular national system in interpreting ICL rules; (3) international courts often survey then synthesize a wide selection of national rules to demonstrate widespread support for their favored approach; (4) at times, international statutes, treaties and national legislation define the same ICL concept differently and finally (5) judicial bodies that interpret ICL occasionally disagree amongst themselves about the interpretation of the same body of law”.

Before concluding that the dance is “improvised  rather than choreographed”, I propose considering diverse observable dynamics as a “work in progress for a world in process,”[1] leaving the question of “what might count as law” open.  It seems to me that by choosing an exclusively state-centric perspective while the world is moving, the authors risk confining themselves to a state-centric, modern representation of LP which identifies the rule of law with state law and makes the concept necessarily oxymoronic.  To be “legal”, pluralism must be integrated into a state order which presupposes a structure that is more or less unified and hierarchical (unified because it is hierarchical) whereas pluralism implies (as traditional international law) the plurality of systems of law and their independence; it separates or juxtaposes different systems but does not organize them.

Beginning in the post-war period, globalization has opened a “post-modern” perspective which does not necessarily imply the disappearance of states, stimulating a somewhat paradoxical sovereign withdrawal, but increasing state interdependence. It leads to an unprecedented development of international law at supra and trans-state levels and even more surprisingly at the infra-state level. It has resulted in a whole that is plural, complex and evolving; a true challenge to the notion of the rule of law.  To address such a challenge, the goal of bringing order to pluralism involves a choreography which combines three interacting processes attempting to reconcile universalism and pluralism.

Three interacting processes

One evokes, in increasing order of integration: horizontal coordination, for example, across “circular models” of one legislator to another, or judicial dialogue; harmonization, which brings differences together rather than abolishing them; and lastly unification as a fusion when differences are incompatible.

The process of coordination facilitates spontaneous and horizontal reconciliation of differing systems.  It is without a doubt the most widely practiced process, from unilateral borrowing to cross-exchange, with examples of “cross fertilization”; but it is also the most uncertain since it relies on the good will of state actors.

The process of harmonization is more restrictive because of its reliance on a hierarchy between the national and international levels, which is itself complex because the hierarchy is flexible depending on its origins at the national or international level.

From the national level to the international level, an upward dynamic of reconciling differences demonstrates the importance of history and memory in illuminating comparative law.  We can only understand it when using critiques of “ahistoricism of legal pluralism” from preceding authors as a starting point.  Neglecting the historical dimension may have the effect of “condoning illegitimate or dysfunctional law”.  But it is also necessary to take into account the ambivalence of comparative law, in the sense that it can be invoked equally to resist as to reconcile differences.  As such, the example provided by the authors of Argentinian criminal procedure as being the “exception which confirms the rule” can also be understood as a reflection of this ambivalence.

It is also crucial to consider the downward dynamic that is at work from the international level to the national level. As discussed, international law is no longer simply inter-state and takes a supra-state status in its universal calling, but pluralism may reappear across diverse international law techniques allowing for “contextualising” the universal.  From this point of view, international criminal law is particularly interesting. Even to demonstrate the notion of a unified principle such as crime “against humanity”, the requirement of “complementarity” can be reintroduced at the national level.  We know that the International Criminal Court can only function competently in contexts where states in question lack the willingness or capacity to judge themselves. To exercise their competence, they must transpose international criminal law to domestic law and this transposition does not exclude a certain margin of national interpretation.

In noting that in both cases, whether ascendant or descendant, harmonization calls for “fuzzy logic”, cleaning up national margins precisely by replacing a requirement of conformity with one of compatibility.  This softening is not always possible.

Whereas the third process, that of unification, solidifies the hierarchy of norms by imposing a single norm, but risks abolishing any hope of pluralism.  Barring the renunciation of the unilateral process of transplantation – the pernicious effects of which have been demonstrated in colonialism –, the benefit of introducing a process of hybridization, which is multilateral and reciprocal.  In fact, it is rare to see such a practice across all scales on the planet.  Even at the level of the ICC, decisions that surround defining attempt, complicity and criminal procedure are informed directly by Western culture.  As such, hybridization is often limited in procedure to combining accusatory and inquisitory models.  On the other hand, crimes against humanity are broadened by notions such as apartheid, and criminal procedure can be enriched with alternative such as truth and reconciliation commissions.  Even more broadly, international law can contribute to the duty of remembrance by creating a duty to anticipate the intentions of future generations (for example, by creating, across cultures, a crime of ecocide).

Reconciling universalism and pluralism 

In a time when globalization reinforces interdependence from one end of the earth to the other, we must discuss the UNESCO Declaration of Cultural Diversity (Nov. 2001).  This declaration (extended through a 2005 convention) made clear the tension between two apparently contradictory principles of international law: on one hand, the universality of values proclaimed by the “Universal” Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1948; and on the other, the principle of diversity of culture and religions, thus of pluralism, making up a “common heritage of humanity” per the UNESCO declaration.  It is not an accident that this principle was posed in the days following September 11^th 2001, which is sometimes characterized as a collision of cultures.

Some have interpreted the principle of diversity of “setting the fox among the chickens”.  But neither the human rights, nor international sanctions against the most serious crimes are comparable to a chicken coup; rather to a winding and unpaved road at risk of becoming an impasse if it leads to a complete relativism where all values ​​are equal. The 2005 Convention does not assert that all values are equal.  It poses the principle of “equal dignity and respect of all cultures” but attempts to push back at the risk of relativism by affirming as a first principle the respect of the rights of man “as set out by the universal declaration or guaranteed by international law”.

While this objective is set out, neither the Universal Declaration of Human Rights nor the UNESCO convention provide a method for reconcile pluralism and universalism.  Our hypothesis is that by rationalizing processes of coordination, harmonization and reciprocal hybridization, it is possible to put a coherent and diversified dynamic in place.  In a moving world, this dynamic must serve not only to construct a “truly common law of humanity”[2] based on the model of the rule of law, but also to avoid the pluralism which divides and universalism which leads to uniformity. We aim to create a path which can be called “ordering pluralism” or “contextualized universalism”, somewhere between the relative and the universal.

[1] See M. Delmas-Marty, « The ICC: a Work in Progress for a World in Process », in M. M. de Guzman and D. M. Amann, Arcs of Global Justice: Essays in Honour of William A. Schabas, Oxford University Press, 2018.

[2] M. Delmas-Marty, Towards a Truly Common Law – Europe As a Laboratory for Legal Pluralism, CUP, 2002. See also her current research project “Vers un jus commune universalisable?”: https://www.pantheonsorbonne.fr/unites-de-recherche/isjps/presentation/equipes-de-lisjps/equipe-de-droit-compare-et-internationalisation-du-droit/vers-un-jus-commune-universalisable/