Mobile People, Mobile Law: expanding legal relations in a contracting world

Author
Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Anne Griffiths

Publisher
Ashgate Publishing Company

Year of publication
2005

ISBN
0-7546-2386-6

OPAC

Abstract
Demonstrating how users of law, who often operate in multi-sited situations, are forced to deal with increasingly complex legal circumstances, this volume focuses on political and social processes through which people appropriate, use and create legal forms in multiple legal settings. It provides new insights into social and political processes through which transnational law is locally appropriated by different actors and presents empirical studies of confrontation, adaptation, vernacularization and hybridization of law due to its transplantation across the borders of national states. The contributors offer insights into modern dynamics of legal change, challenging assumptions about increasing homogeneity in law, with a keen eye for the historical situations in which current legal changes stand.
Published in the Law, Justice and Power series Series editor: Austin Sarat, Professor, Department of Political Science and Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Amherst College, USA To speak about law is always and necessarily to be engaged in a discourse about both justice and power. While law’s relationship to justice is everywhere contingent and uncertain, law completely divorced from power is unthinkable. And, while law need not to be virtuous to be law, if it had no effect in the world it could hardly to be said to merit the name law. Recognizing these facts, the series on Law, Justice and Power is intended to take a broad view of legal scholarship. It will publish books by social scientists, humanists and legal academics which connect an understanding of culture’s normative ideals with examination of the complex ways that law works in the world, insist that justice is inseparable from social practices and analyze law as one form of power, one way of constituting, controlling and changing the social world. The series will focus on state law as well as law in communities and cultural practices and on identities and their articulation in and through law, on law’s power in the taken-for-granted world, on its role in the complex construction of nation and national power and on global developments which today destabilize and transform the meaning and significance of law. It invites innovative scholarship that crosses disciplinary as well as geographic and temporal boundaries.

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