Cultural Diversity in Trial
Based on empirical researches conducted with justice hearings of different states and with families with a migrant background’s pathways into State justice, this contribution analyses the questions raised by cultural diversity for State justice as reflected by two different theoretical approaches in the legal pluralism literature. Emerging from the data analysis, our research identifies two main forms for cultural diversity to appear: the explicit formulation of a cultural argument in the claims of litigants – rare – and much more implicit complex and common forms of manifestation and production of diversity. The discussions of the results allow the authors to clarify the scope and the relevancy of two different ways in conceptualising legal pluralism – between culturalist and critical approaches – in order to contribute to a constructing field of researches marked by both a high rate of judicialization of family conflicts, and also by an increasing ethno-national diverse making-up of societies in the Western world.