IN THE COURTS OF THE NATIONS - DataSpace - Princeton ...

orders. I also turn the focus from how lawmakers managed the existence of multiple legal orders
to how legal consumers moved among different and often competing legal institutions.
Ultimately, I am not particularly concerned with arriving at a new (and presumably
better) definition of law or legal pluralism. In identifying what law was in the case of
nineteenth-century Morocco, I follow Brian Tamanaha’s approach that “law is what people
within social groups have come to see and label as ‘law.’” 84 I am principally interested in using
legal pluralism as a tool to shift the debates on the history of law and of Jews in the Islamic
Mediterranean, rather than using the legal history of Jews in Morocco to influence the ways in
which scholars think about legal pluralism.
In employing legal pluralism as a theoretical framework, I follow in the footsteps of
scholars who have employed legal pluralism as an organizing principle to understand how
various legal orders coexist in Islamic society. 85 Ido Shahar has articulated the benefits of legal
pluralism for the study of sharī‘a courts, though as discussed above his insights should be
extended to include law in Islamic societies broadly speaking. 86 Similarly, Uriel Simonsohn
argues that the legal history of Jews under early Islam is best understood from the point of view
of legal pluralism. 87 Yet as Sarah Stein has pointed out, scholars of Jewish studies have not
engaged with legal pluralism as much as one might expect. 88 Given the inherent plurality
present in any situation in which Jews exercised some sort of judicial power, legal pluralism
seems to be a particularly fruitful framework with which to investigate the history of Jewish law.
84
Tamanaha, “Understanding Legal Pluralism,” 396.
85
Shahar, “Practicing Islamic Law,” esp. 11-35; Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts, esp. 59-62; Julia Clancy-Smith,
Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800-1900 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2011), Chapter 6. See also El-Leithy, “Coptic Culture and Conversion,” 417-20; El-Leithy discusses forum
shopping among different madhāhib by dhimmīs, though he does not explicitly use the term legal pluralism.
86
Shahar, “Legal Pluralism and Shari'a Courts.”
87
Simonsohn, A Common Justice, 11-14.
88
Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Protected Persons? The Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora, the British State, and the Persistence
of Empire,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 1 (2011): 83.
29