Globalisation and Legal Theory

Even local newspapers report on famines, global warming, human rights, the Internet, volatile financial markets, and world sports. Globalisation is news. What does it mean? What are the implications for understanding law? Can one look at law intelligently from a global perspective? This book addresses such issues by asking how traditional Anglo-American legal theory can respond to the challenges of globalisation. A series of critical, in-depth essays focus both on familiar figures, such as Bentham, Holmes, Hart, Dworkin, and Rawls, and on legal pluralism, comparative law, and post-modernism, represented by Santos and Calvino. The author explores the uses and limitations of our heritage of legal theory in dealing with the complexities of ordering relations at global, international, transnational, regional, national, sub-state, and local levels.In the process, he considers a wide range of issues, such as:

-- Is law becoming detached from the nation state?

-- Is humankind a single moral community?

-- Why is drawing a general map of law in the world more difficult?

-- Is depicting a legal order like depicting cities?

-- What is the relationship between post-modernism and globalisation?The book ends with some provocative proposals for reviving general jurisprudence and rethinking comparative law. Readable, imaginative, and challenging, this book should be read by students of jurisprudence, comparative lawyers, and anyone interested in issues of globalisation.