Focus and Scope

Customary Law Review is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal dedicated to the study of customary legal systems, indigenous law, living law traditions, and socio-religious normative practices across diverse societies. It promotes critical inquiry into how customary norms persist, change, and interact with contemporary legal and social frameworks.

The journal particularly encourages interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship on the relationship between customary law, religious legal traditions, and community-based governance in local, national, and transnational contexts. It welcomes original research articles, conceptual papers, and theoretical studies on the following themes:

• Customary law theory, living law, legal anthropology, and legal sociology
• Indigenous legal systems, territorial rights, and community-based normative orders
• Legal pluralism and the interaction between state law, religious law, and customary norms
• Regional customary traditions, including Adat, African customary law, Pacific legal traditions, and other indigenous legal systems
• Dialectics between customary law and Islamic legal traditions, including Sharīʿah-based social practices, living fiqh, and turāth-based legal reasoning

Customary Law Review gives priority to innovative and critically engaged scholarship that contributes to current debates on legal tradition, indigenous governance, socio-religious law, and restorative social order in societies around the world.