Locating a Global Perspective

Abstract

William Twining�s Montesquieu Lecture �Globalisation and Legal Scholarship� is a must read for anyone seeking to understand the relations between law and globalisation which includes, among other things, a need to overcome ethnocentric biases in modern Western law. In my commentary I push his analysis further by suggesting that all legal processes, even those that seem ostensibly domestic and contained within local or national jurisdictions, can be considered to have global implications. In contrast to Twining�s definition of what makes something global, I argue that it is not a matter of spatial scale or geopolitical reach that makes any law or legal process �global�. Global doesn�t just mean big. Putting it another way, what makes a law �global� is the perspective one brings to the questions one asks about all legal phenomena