The colon is the most indicative punctuation mark in academic titles. It screams, “here is what this book is really about, this is my point!” American Sacred Space, a masterful volume edited by David Chidester an Edward T. Linenthal, lacks a colon and corresponding subtitle. So allow me to give it a shot. American Sacred Space: The Final Frontier of Legal Pluralism. While the editors identify the collection of essays as demonstrating that “American religious history can be narrated in terms of the contested zones of space it has inhabited” (x), the true message appears to be that legal pluralism—as a goal and philosophy—breaks down in the face of conflicts over space.

Legal pluralism is the notion that multiple legal systems can exist alongside state law on equal footing, and that citizens have a wide amount of discretion to choose which legal system should govern their lives. These non-state legal systems can have a variety of sources, including national, ethnic, or religious norms. Drawing on Chapter Two of the volume, Native Americans seem to present an extreme example of legal pluralism because they have expansive rights of self-governance and “de jure sovereignty” (67).

Regardless of this government-sanctioned autonomy, Native Americans have almost uniformly lost court battles when the conflict surrounds the use of land—i.e., space. Courts hold that giving tribes certain land rights, even when their claim is based on the constitutional guarantee of the free exercise of religion, amounts to “de facto beneficial ownership” of public property (48). One can blame the persistent loss of court battles on the fact that certain Native American conceptions of property and land are distinctly different from American legal notions of property. For example, Robert S. Michaelsen goes so far to compare the relationship of Native Americans and U.S. Courts in property battles to the protagonists in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, No Exit: They are “bound to live together in apparently everlasting tension” due to their different views of land (50).

However, the entire point of legal pluralism is to negotiate and balance distinct differences in normative orders. Thus we are ill served by an intermediary conclusion that the failure of Native Americans to win property rights in court is due to their distinctly different understandings of land. Legal pluralism anticipates such difference. It perishes without it. Thus I am inclined to draw a more disheartening conclusion from this story: Legal pluralism is impossible when plurality creates a conflict over the use of space. Michaelsen gives us some rationale for this gap: “Control of land is seen as essential to control of culture—to nationhood.” (79). Thus, if courts are willing to respect legal pluralism to the extent it doesn’t challenge control of culture—and space and land are intimately tied up with control of culture—space truly is the final frontier (of legal pluralism).