Thematic Pillar II

Law and Globalization (Year 3)

The process of multidimensional globalization also brings normative cultures closer together. Economic exchange is unthinkable without Werner Gephart: Sphärenreisen (2004)binding rules on the applicability of contracts, and the search for a fairer and more peaceful world order remains of importance, particularly in view of the heightened worldwide potential for conflict. The idea of a global application of individual rights towards states and other powers is not obsolete, despite the ubiquitous violation of human rights, even if the competition of theories about the universal applicability of such rights has been further complicated by the post-development debate.

 

At the same time, a retreat to local, traditional normative orders is also observable. These orders are further reinforced in their particulate tendencies when placed on a religious foundation. Law not only exists within the confines of legal scholars or the autonomous laws of legal systems, but in exchange with the cultural foundations of society. Both the inhibitions of a – oftentimes desired – universalization of legal norms and the access to the idiosyncrasies of individual conceptions of law remain obscure if they are only addressed from the legal perspective of the ‘quid jurisquestion’.

It would be an important task of the Center for Advanced Study to find productive nexuses for a more complex understanding of the normative dimension of the process of globalization with the research tools offered by the humanities, as a substantial deficit is observable within the current debate. The very well developed globalization discourse, as can be seen from Wallerstein to Giddens, from Albrow to Luhmann and Beck, and from Homi Bhaba to Dipesh Chakrabarty, has only had few effects in the field of law, even though such venerable subjects as comparative law and disciplines of international law are well accustomed to conceptually frame local and translocal normative orders. Even though globalization and law is a common subject of research, the confrontation of advanced theories of globalization, or rather of global modernity, with question of transnational and local normative orders promises to be fruitful for both academic cultures.

In this context one should differentiate between different ‘globalization streams’ of law – private law questions might be more closely connected to developments within the economic sphere, while those of public law are inextricably bound to the political sphere, and criminal law problems reflect diverging ‘consciences collectives’ of international criminal law. Particularly because law is traditionally conceived of from the perspective of a state, as a bearer of a legal order, norm-setting competencies which transcend the state point to the limits of the sphere of the state. It therefore appears fruitful to conceptualize law as a ‘sphere’ in the context of globalization, as a kind of ‘judicio-scape’ in analogy to Appadurai’s perspective of globalization. Only a multidimensional approach to the understanding of globalizational processes offers the chance to determine the variable place of law within this complex process.