Exploring “Legal Pluralism: Concepts, Constellations and Challenges”, Prof. Lena Foljanty guided students and lecturers through an all-day workshop on Friday, 10 July 2026, as part of the excellence event “Junge Rechtswissenschaft”. The Law Faculty of the University of Vienna has organised this multi-day event in Strobl am Wolfgangsee since 2016, inviting the 100 best students in the first stage of their studies every year.
In the morning session, Prof. Foljanty and Dr. Fiammetta Bonfigli gave a brief introduction to concepts and constellations of legal pluralism from the perspectives of legal history, legal theory and sociology of law, which the students then applied in group work on examples of Austrian case law.
The afternoon session centred on past and present challenges of legal pluralism. Dr. Luisa Coutinho (Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory) described how Portugal’s missionizing in 16th/17th century Japan caused encounters of Christian normativity and canonical law with Buddhist normativity and Japanese law that opened up spaces for women to argue in plural normativities.
Then, Dr. Agnes Meroka-Mutua (University of Nairobi) gave a captivating presentation on women’s rights and legal pluralism in Kenya. Due to its colonial history, Kenya has a pluralistic legal system with numerous local practices of conflict resolution existing outside national legislation. Dr. Meroka emphatically recounted cases such as genital mutilation or forced marriage of minors, in which national legislation meant to protect women’s human rights remains ineffective in the specific social context. While legal pluralism tends to appear as an obstacle to enforcing women’s rights, she also pointed to cases where local legal practices offer better solutions for women than national legislation.
