Globalization and the Law 2.0: Language Lessons, Theoretical Horizons and Political Stakes

A Legal Theory Workshop with Prof. Peer Zumbansen.

Peer Zumbansen is Professor of Law and Canada Research Chair in Transnational Economic Governance and Legal Theory at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, where he is the (founding) director of the Critical Research Laboratory in Law & Society. Zumbansen received his legal education in Frankfurt, Paris and Harvard and has held visiting professorships in Canada, the U.S., Australia, Colombia, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland.

His recent publications include:Comparative, Global and Transnational Constitutionalism: The Emergence of a Transnational Legal-Pluralist Order, (2012) 1:1 Global Constitutionalism 16; Rethinking the Nature of the Firm: The Corporation as a Governance Object, (2012) 35 Seattle Law Review 1269; Rough Consensus and Running Code: A Theory of Transnational Private Law (with Gralf Calliess), Hart Publishing 2010, pb. 2012. 

Abstract

The relationship between law and globalization has rightly been recognized as an equation with at least three unknowns. Not only have competing definitions of globalization and an increasing number of interpretations of law’s relationship to globalization phenomena emerged, but law itself has become an entity with ever-less certain boundaries.

In light of an increasingly interdisciplinary engagement with the prospects of law’s modernist trias of legislation, enforcement and adjudication in a global context, legal scholars and law school teachers are hard-pressed to follow Trinity’s example in Matrix 1 – learning to fly a helicopter by instant download. Now, as for most of us that is not an option, we must direct our efforts towards a more process-based, incremental approach to learn the vocabulary and syntax of globalized law.

The seminar will review a number of developments in this context before suggesting elements of a methodological approach to the challenge at hand.