The aim of the article is to present to a predominantly Anglophone audience current
work in French/Quebecois legal anthropology. This work attempts to build an epistemology
for an intercultural legal theory and is opening up a dialogical approach to
Law, which goes beyond the mere project of an intercultural legal theory. In order to
do so, the article presents the LAJP’s (Laboratory of Legal Anthropology of Paris)
move towards a non-ethnocentric science of Law followed by a presentation of
Panikkar’s and Vachon’s contributions on the ‘dialogical method’ which clarify the
epistemological foundations of a pluralist approach to Law and lead to a presentation
of Etienne Le Roy’s theory of ‘multilegalism’ [multijuridisme]. The whole approach
and its relevance are then illustrated through examples on the local, national and
global planes in the fields of youth justice, French legal cooperation, land law and
human rights and international penal law.
