Contending Orders: Legal Pluralism and the Rule of Law, by Geoffrey Swenson, Oxford University Press, Oxford University Press, 288 pages, $74
Geoffrey Swenson's Contending Orders is interesting for two reasons. The first is that Swenson, who is both a lawyer and a political scientist, takes seriously the existence of nonstate law and its associated legal systems—in this case, in the context of traditional societies emerging from violent conflict. The second is that he describes attempts in two very different societies to replace traditional legal and political institutions with modern ones. By his account the project is succeeding in one case and has failed in the other, in part because the first did and the second did not succeed in creating a cooperative relationship between state and nonstate institutions.
