Searching For Contemporary Legal Thought

For more than a century, law schools have trained students to 'think like a lawyer'. In these times of legal crisis, both in legal education and in global society, what does that mean for the rest of us? In this book, thirty leading international scholars - including Louis Assier-Andrieu, Marianne Constable, Yves Dezalay, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Bryant G. Garth, Peter Goodrich, Duncan Kennedy, Martti Koskenniemi, Shaun McVeigh, Samuel Moyn, Annelise Riles, Charles F. Sabel and William H. Simon - examine what is distinctive about legal thought. They probe the relation between law and time, law and culture, and legal thought and legal action; the nature of current legal thought; the geography of legal thought; and the conditions for recognition of a new 'contemporary' style of law. This work will help theorists, social scientists, historians and students understand the intellectual context of legal problems, legal doctrine, and jurisprudential trends in the current conjuncture.

Are the general and the particular separated in legal rhetorics? What is the function of singular events, facts, names in legal argumentation and what is their relationship to legal normativity? This collection of 11 essays takes a diachronic approach to address these questions from the perspective of contemporary legal discourse.

Explores the ideological, political, and economic stakes of struggles over international law's history and its relation to empire and capitalism.

This book is concerned with a central question in contemporary legal theory: how to describe global law? In addressing this question, the book brings together two features that are different and yet connected to one another: the conceptual description of contemporary law on the one hand, and methods of taking concrete perspectives on law on the other hand. The book provides a useful concept for describing global law: thinking of law spatially. It illustrates that space is a concept with the capacity to capture the relationality, dynamics, and hybridity of law. Moreover, this book investigates the role of topological thinking in finding concrete perspectives on law. Legal Spaces offers an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to law.

This is the seventh edition of the leading work on transnational and comparative commercial, financial, and trade law, covering a wide range of complex topics in the modern law of international commerce and finance. As a guide for students and practitioners it has proven to be unrivalled. The work is divided into three volumes, each of which can be used independently or as part of the complete work. Volume 1, in the first chapter, covers the roots and foundations of private law; the different origins, structure, and orientation of civil and common law; the forces behind the emergence of a new transnational commercial and financial legal order, its meaning, concepts, and operation; the theoretical basis of the transnationalisation of the law in the professional sphere in that order; its methodology and the autonomous sources of the new law merchant or modern lex mercatoria, its international finance-driven impulses, and its relationship to domestic and transnational public policy and public order requirements. The second chapter covers the transnationalisation of dispute resolution in that order, especially international arbitration, and contains a critical analysis of the main challenges to its success, continuing credibility, and effectiveness. All three volumes may be purchased separately or as part of a single set.

In a world in which racism and xenophobia are endemic, what is the role of international law? To the extent international rules are thought to have any relevance at all, the typical approach characterizes international law as on the side of racial justice. Human rights instruments like the United Nations' International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are paradigmatic, offering the world international agreements in which governments are directed to avoid racist behavior and promote antiracist action. In The Right to Exclude, Justin Desautels-Stein goes against the grain and asks whether certain rules of international law might actually produce structures of racial hierarchy, rather than limiting them. The intellectual fulcrum for this production, Desautels-Stein argues, lies in the ideological structures of sovereignty and property, the right to exclude that is shared in those twinned precincts, and the border regimes that result. Applying critical race theory to contemporary problems of migration, nationalism, multiculturalism, decolonization, and self-determination, Desautels-Stein expounds a theory of "postracial xenophobia", a structure of racial ideology that justifies and legitimates a pragmatic account of racialized foreignness, a racial xenos.

In this book the author interviews ten legal experts that in the late 20th century changed the way we understand and use theory in law today.