Legal Practice and Cultural Diversity considers how contemporary cultural and religious diversity challenges legal practice, how legal practice responds to that challenge, and how practice is changing in the encounter with the cultural diversity occasioned by large-scale, post-war immigration. Locating actual practices and interpretations which occur in jurisprudence and in public discussion, this volume examines how the wider environment shapes legal processes and is in turn shaped by them. In so doing, the work foregrounds a number of themes principally relating to changing norms and practices and sensitivity to cultural and religious difference in the application of the law. Comparative in approach, this study places particular cases in their widest context, taking into account international and transnational influences on the way in which actors, legal and other, respond.

Contents: Legal practice and cultural diversity: introduction, Roger Ballard, Alessandro Ferrari, Ralph Grillo, André J. Hoekema, Marcel Maussen and Prakash Shah; Cultural diversity: challenge and accommodation, Roger Ballard, Alessandro Ferrari, Ralph Grillo, André J. Hoekema, Marcel Maussen and Prakash Shah; Indian secular pluralism and its relevance for Europe, Werner Menski; Legal pluralism and differentiated morality: Shari'a in Ontario?, Veit Bader; Transforming to accommodate? Reflections on the Shari'a debate in Britain, Prakash Shah; Shari'a in a European context, Mathias Rohe; Objection, Your Honour! Accommodating niqab-wearing women in courtrooms, Natasha Bakht; The challenge of African customary laws to English legal culture, Gordon R. Woodman; Religious challenges to the secularized identity of an insecure polity: a tentative sociology of Québec's 'reasonable accommodation' debate, Jean-FranÃ
ois Gaudreault-DesBiens; Does the Dutch judiciary pluralize domestic law?, André J. Hoekema; The influence of culture on the determination of damages: how cultural relativism affects the analysis of trauma, Alison Dundes Renteln; Jews and Muslims in France; changing responses to cultural and religious diversity, Martine Cohen; L'affaire du foulard in the shadow of the Strasbourg court: Article 9 and the public career of the veil in France, Claire de Galembert; The changing position of religious minorities in English law: the legacy of Begum, Russell Sandberg; Approaches to diversity in the domestic courts: Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights, Samantha Knights; Human rights in contexts of ethnic plurality: always a vehicle for liberation?, Roger Ballard; Index.