The Constitutive Paradox of Modern Law: A Comment on Tully

This commentary draws out and elaborates upon some of the more challenging aspects of Professor Tully\u27s sophisticated taxonomy of the relationship between modern constitutional forms and constituent powers. Tully\u27s article reveals the historical particularities of these formations, and at the same time encourages the reader to think beyond them, towards the potentially uncategorizable realm of democratic constitutionalism. Yet, how is it possible to use a taxonomy of modern constitutional democracy as a means of understanding what ties in the uncharted territory beyond? This commentary further explores to what extent this paradoxical modern configuration of constituent powers and constitutional forms may be connected to a paradox at the heart of modern law

Passing Through the Mirror : Dead Man, Legal Pluralism and the De-Territorialization of the West

The failures of Western law in its encounter with indigenous legal orders have been well documented, but alternative modes of negotiating the encounter remain under-explored in legal scholarship. The present article addresses this lacuna. It proceeds from the premise that the journey towards a different conceptualization of law might be fruitfully re-routed through the affect-laden realm of embodied experience – the experience of watching the subversive anti-western film Dead Man. Section II explains and develops a Deleuzian approach to law and film which involves thinking about film as ‘‘event.’’ Section III considers Dead Man’s relation to the western genre and its implications for how we think about law’s founding on the frontier. Finally, the article explores the concept of ‘‘becoming’’ through a consideration of the relationship between the onscreen journey of the character Bill Blake and the radical worldview of his poetic namesake

A Crisis and its Afterlife: Some Reflections on ‘Scholars in Self-Estrangement’

This essay is an extended reflection on the avenues of influence of a single article, one that is arguably the most cited contribution to scholarship on law and development of the last 40 years. In that article, published in the Wisconsin Law Review in 1974, David Trubek and Marc Galanter confidently identified and cogently parsed a ‘crisis’ in law and development studies in the United States. ‘Scholars in Self-Estrangement: Some Reflections on the Crisis in Law and Development Studies in the United States’ (hereinafter SISE), was undoubtedly a key intervention in the debate over US funding of law reform projects abroad of its time. Yet, as the research conducted for this essay has documented, it continues to be routinely cited by law and development scholars as well as many academics in other fields. In some ways, this tenacity is difficult to fathom—SISE was a piece that was produced at a particular moment of crisis in the field in the US and addresses itself specifically to that moment. It is a piece of writing that is admirably clear about its modest ambitions and the relatively narrow scope of the audience that it explicitly sought to address. The authors note that the paper originated in a report that had been produced for the Research Advisory Committee of the International Legal Centre. Further, they describe the crisis as affecting the ‘relatively small group of academics’ who are engaged in a ‘specialized area of US academic study concerned with the relationship between legal systems and the ‘development’— social, economic and political changes—occurring in third world countries’. And yet, the paper’s influence has extended well beyond the circumstances, political era and geographic location in which it was produced

Constructing Virtual Justice in the Global Arena

This is a review of Dezalay and Garth, Dealing in Virtue: International Commercial Arbitration and the Construction of a Transnational Legal Order

Reconceptualizing Law and Politics in the Transnational: Constitutional and Legal Pluralist Approaches

Despite the apparent fluidity that characterizes this historical moment as well as this moment in legal scholarship, this paper argues that there is also an enduring rigidity that is found in the persistence of a modernist conception of law. It is revealed in debates surrounding transnational constitutionalism, which even as they purport to transcend the nation-state, cannot escape some forms of reinscription of the relation between law and a centralized sovereign authority

Looking into Law and Development: Pedagogies and Politics of the Frame

International development can be understood as a particular way of seeing the world that is both a pedagogical and a political project. It frames the citizens of “underdeveloped” states as subjects, available to be both “seen” and “known” in particular ways that have important implications for governance and law. This Special Issue approaches development as a discourse and as a set of practices that encompass a “way of seeing” and operate as a “frame” through which the subjects of development are apprehended and acted upon

Reconceptualizing Law and Politics in the Transnational Constitutional and Legal Pluralist Approaches

Despite the apparent fluidity that characterizes this historical moment as well as this moment in legal scholarship, this paper argues that there is also an enduring rigidity in the persistence of a modernist conception of law. In the way that the important questions raised for legal scholars in the current moment are identified as questions for legal theory, they are also already \u27framed\u27 in terms of a particular approach to the relationship between legality and legitimacy. This is revealed in debates over post-national constitutionalism which, even as they purport to transcend the nation-state, fail to escape some form of reinscription of the relation between law and a centralized sovereign authority. The author suggests that an alternative, more capacious approach to re-imagining law in the transnational might be found in a turn to legal pluralism, understood as a metaphor or style of thinking about law

Legitimating Global Trade Governance: Constitutional and Legal Pluralist Approaches

This article will take up the conversation about legal pluralism in the context of debates over transnational governance, where legal pluralism has of late attracted considerable attention. Legal pluralism has its roots in legal sociology and anthropology, and particularly in the study of the co-existence of non-state, customary law or community norms with formal law. In the transnational context, this original focus is expanded to include the coexistence, within a particular territory, of multiple normative regimes, local, national and international. What is important to note, however, is that in this shift the conceptual orientation of the term remains the same: the effort to provide an empirically accurate description of multiple positive legal orders. That is, legal pluralism is conventionally utilized to identify a relevant attribute of the social fields in which law operates. So, most recent considerations of ‘global legal pluralism’ either invoke or illustrate the multiple, diverse and possibly even contested sources of law in transnational arenas, and argue for their growing sociological significance. As I will elaborate below, while legal multiplicity is highlighted and even valorized in some of these accounts, their analytic reach is circumscribed by a positive conception of law itself