The ‘new essentialism’ in both cultural and legal theory is the tendency to treat ‘diversity’ as a monolithic concept which exists logically prior to law or culture’s efforts to engage or reconcile it. By using analogies of scale and measurement, and borrowing from Luhmann’s theory of self-referential social systems, the article argues that there is no such thing as a diversity which does not emanate from an ‘impulse to measure’. Thus, ‘global:local’ is a presupposition which underpins certain systems’ way of imagining the world and not an observation available from an inaccessible God’s-eye view. Contrary to popular mythology, the article seeks to understand the law as yet another conjurer of difference rather than its great leveller, and to understand the way different legal paradigms might conceptualize diversity in very distinct ways.
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