Localized Law

In the early second century CE, two Jewish women, Babatha and Salome Komaise, lived in the village of Maoza on the southern coast of the Dead Sea, which came under direct Roman rule in 106 CE. The archives these two women left behind provide a tantalizing glimpse into the ways in which the inhabitants of this region interacted with their new rulers and how this affected the practice of law in this part of the Roman Empire. The papers provide details of the women's property, marriages, and disputes, and are remarkable in their legal diversity: Nabataean, Roman, Greek, and Jewish legal elements are all in evidence. Consequently, identifying the supposed 'operative law' of the documents has proven a highly contentious task, with scholarly advocates of each of these traditions have failed to reach any true consensus. This volume proposes a change in focus: instead of attempting to idenify the 'legal system' behing the documents, it seeks instead to understand the 'legal culture' of the community that produced them. Through a series of case studies of the ways in which the people involved in the creation of the papyri variously perceived and approached their legal transactions, it argues that concentration on these different agents' understandings will ultimately help scholars to better understand the actual funtioning of law and justice both in this particular village and in other small communities in the Roman Empire --Back cover.

To what extent are global rule-of-law norms, which external actors promote in post-conflict states, localized? Who decides whether global standards or local particularities prevail? This book offers a new approach to the debate about how the dilemma between the diffusion of global norms and their localization is dealt with in global politics. Studying the promotion of children's rights, access to public information, and an international commission against impunity in Guatemala, Lisbeth Zimmermann demonstrates that rule-of-law promotion triggers domestic contestation and thereby changes the approach taken by external actors, and ultimately the manner in which global norms are translated. However, the leeway in local translation is determined by the precision of global norms. Based on an innovative theoretical approach and an in-depth study of rule-of-law translation, Zimmermann argues for a shift in norm promotion from context sensitivity to democratic appropriation, speaking to scholars of international relations, peacebuilding, democratization studies, international law, and political theory.

"Abstract Global legal pluralism has become one of the leading analytical frameworks for understanding and conceptualizing law in the twenty-first century"--

Legal Passing offers a nuanced look at how the lives of undocumented Mexicans in the US are constantly shaped by federal, state, and local immigration laws. Angela S. García compares restrictive and accommodating immigration measures in various cities and states to show that place-based inclusion and exclusion unfold in seemingly contradictory ways. Instead of fleeing restrictive localities, undocumented Mexicans react by presenting themselves as “legal,” masking the stigma of illegality to avoid local police and federal immigration enforcement. Restrictive laws coerce assimilation, because as legal passing becomes habitual and embodied, immigrants distance themselves from their ethnic and cultural identities. In accommodating destinations, undocumented Mexicans experience a localized sense of stability and membership that is simultaneously undercut by the threat of federal immigration enforcement and complex street-level tensions with local police. Combining social theory on immigration and race as well as place and law, Legal Passing uncovers the everyday failures and long-term human consequences of contemporary immigration laws in the US.

Despite international conventions and human rights declarations, millions of people have suffered and continue to suffer torture, slavery, or violent deaths, with no remedy or recourse. They have fallen, in essence, “below the law,” outside of law’s protection. Often violated by their own governments, sometimes with support from transnational corporations, or nations benefiting from human rights violations, how can these victims find justice? Lawyers Beyond Borders reveals the inner workings of the advances and retreats in the quest for redress and restoration of human rights for those whom international legal-political systems have failed. The process of justice begins in the US, with a handful of human rights lawyers steeped in the American tradition of advancing civil rights through civil litigation. As the civil rights movement gained traction and an ample supply of lawyers, this small cadre turned their attention toward advancing international human rights, via the US legal system. They sought to build another piece of the rights revolution, this time for survivors of egregious human rights violations in faraway lands. These cases were among the most unlikely to be slated for victory: The abuses occurred abroad; the victims are aliens, usually with few, if any, resources; the perpetrators are politically powerful, resourced, and well connected, often members of governments, militaries, or multinational corporations. The legal and political systems’ structures are mostly stacked against these survivors, many who bear the scars of trauma and terror. Lawyers Beyond Borders is about agency. It is about how, in the face of powerful interests and seemingly insurmountable obstacles—political, psychological, economic, geographical, and physical—a small group of lawyers and survivors navigated a terrain of daunting barriers to begin building, case-by-case, new pathways to justice for those who otherwise would have none.