Multiculturalism and Law: A Critical Debate

Multiculturalism and Law: A Critical Debate. By Omid A. Payrow Shabani, ed. Cardiff: University ofWales Press, 2007. Pp. xiv1338. $35.00 paper.

This edited volume presents 13 high-quality essays in political philosophy concerned with legal multiculturalism, specifically with issues raised when liberal democracies adopt legal policies in response to group-based claims for differential treatment of ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and national minorities and indigenous persons. While this may seem well-trodden territory, this collection's importance lies in the way some of the most important contemporary political and legal theorists here incorporate insights from older debates while moving on to new, more sophisticated explanatory and analytic frameworks, all the while taking seriously the empirical evidence from the implementation of multiculturalist legal policies in varied forms and across diverse political contexts.

Stylizing strongly, one can see this volume as at the cutting edge of a third phase of theorizing about multiculturalism in the context of liberal democracies. In the first phase, issues were approached largely through the matrix developed to think about the assimilation of immigrants, and so the main issues concerned the best way of negotiating the tensions between formal legal equality and transitory exceptions to accommodate cultural differences. However, given that this schema assumed that differences would...