How Jean-Guy Belley Thinks: A Translator's Note

Why has Quebec proved such a fertile ground for the study of legal pluralism over the last generation? It is not that formalism in law is any less tenacious in Quebec than elsewhere, or that the state-made law is held in lower esteem. If anything, the fabled cult of enactment that characterizes modern civilian methodology has been exacerbated in the run-up to the adoption of the Civil Code of Québec and the twenty years since that moment. The mixed nature of Quebec legal sources, given that mixité is seen as much as a historical fact as the basis for a way of knowing law, cannot explain the wealth of scholarly attention devoted to diversity in law. Whether Quebec's brand of pluralism for law comes from factors such as linguistic and cultural diversity, an ongoing contact with Aboriginal law, or a special experience with religious law is a matter of ongoing speculation. But in the final analysis, it is not unfair to think that legal pluralism has flourished in Quebec because of the work of a handful of imaginative scholars who have invested their talent in this intellectual project.Professor Jean-Guy Belley is plainly one of their number. His work as a theorist of legal pluralism is celebrated in Quebec and well read in France. Yet his prodigious scholarly output is less well known elsewhere in Canada, where that work would likely be understood to have special relevance. Indeed, over the past ten or so years, Professor Belley has placed increasing emphasis on Anglo-American legal scholarship and common-law sources in his teaching and thinking about law. The translation of the foregoing essay has therefore been prepared at once as a respectful homage to a friend and colleague and in the hope that, in a modest way, it might encourage a wider readership for his important work.