Laws and Societies in Global Contexts: Contemporary Approaches

This text seeks to situate sociolegal studies in a global context. Law and society scholarship in the United States and elsewhere typically assumes one legal system and one society and explores the relationship between them. Such a narrow endeavor perpetuates a Western international relations model that too often conflates law, culture, and the nation-state. A more global sociolegal perspective engages with multiple laws and societies within and across national borders and recognizes diverse sociolegal systems based on very different historical and cultural traditions, interacting on multiple local, national, and global levels. This more global perspective also reveals an array of transnational issues including regional conflicts, genocide, mass immigration, environmental degradation, and climate change that have consistently defied resolution via conventional international system of governance. The approach to global legal pluralism outlined here seeks to provide a framework for envisioning new global governance regimes that move beyond state-based solutions to deal with trenchant transnational challenges.

Author: Eve Darian-Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 01/31/2013
Pages: 434
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780521113786

About the Author
Darian-Smith, Eve: - Eve Darian-Smith is Professor in Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds degrees in law (Melbourne) and sociocultural anthropology (Harvard, Chicago). Her research engages with issues of legal pluralism and explores the changing role of law and legal institutions in the context of globalization. Her first book, Bridging Divides: The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity in the New Europe, won the Law and Society Association Herbert Jacob Book Prize. Subsequent books include Laws of the Postcolonial; New Capitalists: Law, Politics and Identity Surrounding Casino Gaming on Native American Land; and most recently Religion, Race, Rights: Landmarks in the History of Anglo-American Law. She is on various editorial boards and is a former associate editor of American Ethnologist and Law and Society Review.