An Indian scholar’s reflections: What ‘mimicry’ of legal procedures say about how society uses law

How are disputes resolved when formal legal processes are difficult to follow and customary norms of dispute resolution have not quite evolved?

I uncover that in certain types of cases, people resolve the dispute informally while adopting a formal court-like structure, almost mimicking official procedures. People set up dispute resolution processes that are cosmetically similar to the formal system and behave “as if” the entire process is legal.

Legal pluralism scholars have explained the idea of informal social norms in dispute resolutions in several postcolonial communities across the world. What these studies have missed out on is how the law offers a framework that can also be used by people to adopt their own versions of informal dispute resolution if no informal social norm previously existed in their communities.

Capturing this phenomenon offers a useful entry point into understanding how people “imagine law” as expressed in the literature on legal consciousness. A useful example here is the juridical institution of divorce.

Divorce procedures

Consider divorce matters in India. Conjugal laws are designed to prevent marriages from breaking apart. That is why divorce procedures in India carry huge transaction costs, with significant emotional and financial burden on the couple even when separation is mutual. At the same time, people cannot legally...

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