Law and Globalism: Law without the State as Law without Violence

AuthorJulieta Lemaitre
Pages433-445
The Handbook of Law and Society, First Edition. Edited by Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Introduction
Law, as a field of practice and meaning, contest and aspiration, has a life that extends
beyond state boundaries. Norms travel, both literally as statutes, practices and
interpretations, and in their more elusive existence as justice claims framed as rights
and entitlements. Increasingly, law is produced or promoted by non‐state actors
such as social movement activists, international norm entrepreneurs, private
business interests and special interest lobbies. Lawyers themselves work across
national boundaries, through networks and alliances for the production of norms
and for their implementation. These trends have been described and analyzed by a
wide and varied socio‐legal scholarship. This chapter both describes this scholar-
ship, and critiques its lack of theoretical engagement with the problem of violence in
a field of law beyond state boundaries.
The varied use of the terms “global” and “globalization” is a testimony to the
vitality of law’s life beyond national borders. It includes both the reference to the
international or the transnational (global constitutionalism, global administrative
law, global civil society) and a reference to the contemporary expansion of market
capitalism and liberal political institutions (global capitalist class, globalizing
institutions, global business regulation).1 There is also a wide range of disciplinary
variation: for anthropologists the globalization of law is mostly about cultures and
communities; for political scientists it is about power and institutions, and for soci-
ologists it is about social groups, classes and social movement. Interdisciplinary
legal studies share, in spite of the variation in disciplinary frames and objects of
study, the interest in power.
Law and Globalism
Law without the State as Law without Violence
Julieta Lemaitre
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