Law, Culture, And Social Norms: Understanding Customary Practices in Conflict with Constitutional RightS

Abstract

The coexistence of customary practices and formal constitutional frameworks presents an enduring legal and normative dilemma, particularly within pluralistic and postcolonial societies. While cultural traditions offer continuity, identity, and social cohesion, they may simultaneously perpetuate exclusionary or discriminatory norms that stand in direct conflict with constitutional guarantees such as gender equality, human dignity, and access to justice. This review interrogates the deeply entangled relationship between law, culture, and social norms, illuminating how entrenched customary systems can either resist or adapt to constitutional imperatives. Through an interdisciplinary synthesis of legal scholarship, sociological theory, and jurisprudential analysis, the article foregrounds emblematic case studies from India, Africa, and Indigenous communities, exposing a persistent global dialectic between legal universalism and cultural relativism. Courts, while often positioned as mediators, oscillate between preserving cultural autonomy and enforcing constitutional supremacy. The study contends that transformative reconciliation lies not in the imposition of abstract rights, but in deliberate, context-sensitive legal reform, civic education, and community-driven normative evolution—mechanisms capable of aligning tradition with progressive constitutional mandates in an ethically plural, legally pluralistic world.