BOOK: Lindahl on Fault Lines of Globalization:

Oxford University Press will soon publish Hans Lindahl, Fault lines of globalization: legal order and the politics of a-legality:


The question whether and how boundaries might individuate and constitute a legal order has yet to be discussed in a systematic and comprehensive manner by legal and political theory. This book seeks to address this important omission, providing an original contribution to the debate about law in a global setting. It opposes the widely endorsed assumption that we are now moving towards law without boundaries, and argues that every imaginable legal order, global or otherwise, is bounded in space, time, membership, and content.The book is built up around three main insights. Firstly, that legal orders can best be understood as a form of joint action in which authorities mediate and uphold who ought to do what, where, and when with a view to realising the normative point of acting together. Secondly, that behaviour can call into question the boundaries that determine who ought to do what, where and when: a-legality. Thirdly, that this a-legality reveals boundaries as marking a limit and, to a lesser or greater extent, a fault line of the respective legal order.