The concept of legal families maintained the law of other peoples in the western view at a time of legal scientism and legal nationalism, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It did so by accepting the idea of national legal systems and the possibility of a taxonomic description of them. As communication between the peoples of the world accelerated in the late twentieth century it became more and more evident that national legal systems could no longer be treated as autonomous and sovereign, as both new and ancient forms of non-state law asserted themselves. The notion of legal traditions allows a conceptual understanding of the relations of laws conceived as normative information. There can thus be multiple laws applicable in a given territory, with varying degrees of influence, since the concept of legal tradition is one which accommodates multiple sources of law and gradations in the force of their normativity.