Regulation is not an official monopoly; There are several areas of normative entrepreneurship, innovation and interpretation. State law does not rule over a regulatory landscape, but over a dense tangle of rivals and companions. Its effects depend on how it interacts with the different types of Indigenous orders around it; The main official institutions themselves are the scene of persistent and pervasive local variations. These different differences in unity and uniformity were examined under the headings of private government, indigenous law, semi-autonomous social zones, and local legal culture. Pluralism accompanies us a lot: the centralist vision of a monolithic integrated legal order does not turn out to be a description of modern law, but a part of its ideology. This is not a problem that is a thing of the past. In the former colonies, most courts still apply customary law to many disputes involving the rural population. Parts of customary law are thus incorporated into constitutional law. This is a case of constructed legal pluralism. However, the application of customary law concerns only the substantive provisions; State court procedures are always designed by the State. Thus, “traditional” substantive law is applied in the context of State law procedures, which has led to significant changes in substantive rules.
In fact, there are two types of customary law: local law, as developed and applied by the local population itself; and “customary law” or “traditional law” as applied by State institutions. While these two types of law are not completely independent, they have complex relationships with each other and with state law. Dutch authors who wrote about colonial law, such as Van Vollenhoven, were well aware of what was happening (Holleman 1981). The term adat law was developed precisely to indicate the difference with adat – the Malay term for local customs in the broadest sense of the word, way of life. Today, the term Adat law is generally used for state-defined and local versions of customary law. Institutional recognition of a habitual or religious legal system has occurred when the institutions of that system have been incorporated into a State legal system, for example when heads have become administrative officials or judges of the State. This often happened in the British colonies, in accordance with the policy of indirect domination, which aimed to rule the colonies by indigenous forms of government. With the abandonment of politics from the 1940s, this recognition lost its meaning, but it continued in a limited form. In other colonies, it was adopted as a concession to local opinion, as well as for practical reasons; it has also continued there since independence. Customary and religious laws were not and could not be “adopted” in constitutional law without radical changes in their nature and content. The State has always excluded from incorporation certain parts of customary law, such as those that provide for slavery that run counter to the fundamental values of the State. Moreover, the acceptable elements of the customary and religious legal systems could not be taken into account without reformulation.
The institution of the leader, for example, changes when his authority no longer derives from respect for tradition and community identity, but is based on the threat of coercion on the part of state institutions. Forms of coercion by State institutions, such as the threat of imprisonment in support of a court decision, differ from the social pressure traditionally exerted on the parties to the dispute to agree on a compromise. Therefore, normative recognition has generally led to the coercion of behavior of a different type than what would otherwise have occurred. After all, staff in state institutions are often unfamiliar with customary or religious law and have “recognized” norms that differ from those to which one adheres socially. Thus, State institutions create new norms, “official”, “judicial” or “lawyers”, customary laws that differ from the “popular”, “popular”, “indigenous” or “customary” laws that continued to be observed outside the State administrations.