Abstract

I would like to use this seminar to have your views on the first draft of Part I of the monograph I am currently writing about the relation between boundaries and legal order. Part I falls into four chapters. Chapter 1 contextualizes the discussion by drawing on the findings of Saskia Sassen's empirically informed contribution to the sociology of globalisation to undermine the widely shared assumption that the uncoupling of law and state exposes the inside/outside distinction as a merely contingent feature of legal order. Chapter 2 is the conceptual heart of Part I: it unveils a preliminary model of legal orders, national and post-national, that explains why they are necessarily bounded in space, time, subjectivity and content. It runs through three concrete scenarios that illustrate how behaviour can deploy at least three different relations to boundaries, namely legality, illegality and a-legality. The third of these relations captures the nature of the distinction between familiar and strange worlds; it is decisive for explaining why all imaginable legal orders are perforce bounded in each of the abovementioned dimensions. Chapter 3 tests and validates this model, scrutinising its explanatory power with respect to a wide range of possible counter-examples. It discusses, amongst others, the hypothetical example of a world state; the European Union and its relation to the law of its members states; the law of a nomadic people, the Roma; the law of an indige-nous people, the U’we in Colombia; lex mercatoria; multinationals; and the law of the internet. Chapter 4 draws, finally, on these empirical results to revisit and refine the model of bounded legal order sketched out in Chapter 2. The core of this chapter is the problem of the individuation and deindividuation of legal orders. This problem had been introduced at the end of Chapter 1 as a more promising way of illuminating the relation between boundaries and legal order than the traditional theoretical approach to the concept of law, which focuses on the criteria that distinguish law from....