En central föreställning om den moderna nationalstaten är att den är juridiskt suverän inom det egna territoriet. De senaste decenniernas stora politiska och sociala förändringar har dock gjort gränserna porösare mellan olika territoriella enheter. Överstatliga organisationer som EU och FN har bidragit till att transformera staternas oavhängighet i frågor som har att göra med lag och rätt. Men även migration och framväxtenav mångkulturella samhällen sätter självklara rättsliga och moraliska uppfattningar om »rätt« och »fel« på spel. I artikeln diskuterar jag, ur socialantropologisk synvinkel, hur religiöst partikulära synsätt kring centrala sociala institutioner som familj och äktenskap utmanar statens universella anspråk på oavhängighet i frågor om moral och juridik.

The good family and good family lawDebates about law and morals in multicultural Europe

In this article I discuss how political andsocial transformations challenge the juridical space of the nation-state. Globalization, in terms of migration and the spread of rights and duties from supranational institutions such as the EU and the UN, distort taken-for-granted »national« assumptions about which norms and legal prescriptions citizens are supposed to follow when they organize their everyday activities.The focus in my discussion is on universal social institutions such as marriage and the family. What is marriage and family? What laws and regulations should be used to regulate relations between members of these institutions? I want to show that various religious traditions (Christian, Islamic and Jewish) have their own set of definitions and rules. When these rights andduties are confronted with other legal traditions found in Western Europe it is not altogether clear which rules actors should fall back on. A central theme in my discussion is the discrepancy between the formal legal system and how legal prescriptions are acted upon in the informal everyday life of citizens in the multicultural society. I argue that it is not self-evident how this discrepancy should be overcome, or if this is possible. These questions are, as I show, complex since the state and its citizens often have contradictory views of how a »normal« family is constituted.