This important book offers an ambitious and interdisciplinary vision of how private international law (or the conflict of laws) might serve as a heuristic for re-working our general understandings of legality in directions that respond to ever-deepening global ecological crises. Unusual in legal scholarship, the author borrows (in bricolage mode) from the work of Bruno Latour, alongside indigenous cosmologies, extinction theories and Levinassian phenomenology, to demonstrate why this field's specific frontier location at the outpost of the law – where it is viewed from the outside as obscure and from the inside as a self-contained normative world – generates its potential power to transform law generally and globally.
Combining pragmatic and pluralist theory with an excavation of ‘shadow’ ecological dimensions of law, the author, a recognised authority within the field as conventionally understood, offers a truly global view. Put simply, it is a generational magnum opus. All international and transnational lawyers, be they in the private or public field, should read this book.
Preface v Introduction: Inklings 1 I. Nature as Alterity in Legal Form 5 II. Nature, Legality and Natural Law 8 III. Law, Bios and Bare Life 13 IV. Globalisation: A Very Short Story 14 V. The ‘Old Settlement’ and the Legal Summa Divisio 15 VI. Caveats: Law and Nomos; Lex and Ius 20 VII. Private International Law and its Double Scenography 23 VIII. Law’s Residues and the Shadow Story 28 IX. Bricolage, Interdisciplinarity and Method 29 X. What is Ecological about this Alternative Jurisprudential Design? 31 XI. Plan and Project 31 Part I Epistemology and Genealogy: Struggling for the Soul of Method I. An Initial Glimpse: Private International Law and its Inner Conflicts 45 II. An Example: Cross-Border Environmental Litigation 46 III. Down to Earth: Punctum 50 IV. Bird’s-Eye View: Studium 56 V. The Stakes in Method 61 A. Monism vs Pluralism and Theories of Truth 61 B. The Ecological Nature of Method 63 C. Approaching Alterity in Legal Form 65 Nature at the Stake 68 1. The Story of Origin 69 I. Genealogy and Methodology 71 A. The Consensual Tale 72 B. Frictions and Contradictions 77 II. Myth and Legacy 84 A. The Domestic Front: Irrelevance 85 B. The International Front: Self-Isolation 90 The Return of the Repressed 94 2. The Shadow Account 96 I. Dialectical Tensions 99 A. Paradigm Dichotomies 101 B. Nesting 104 II. Competing Imaginaries 107 A. State/Non-State 110 B. Law and Fact 118 C. Foreign/Domestic 124 Eclosion 129 Part II Aesthetics and Ontology: Constructing the Nomos of the In-Between 3. Jurisdictional Jurisprudence 141 I. Topos and Telos 145 A. Territoriality as Natural Description 147 B. Territoriality as Value Judgement 152 II. Sovereignty 156 A. The Law of Laws 158 B. The Status of the Exception 166 Transition(s) 171 4. A Jurisprudence of the Border 172 I. A ‘Juridical Ecology of Ligatures’ 178 A. Law as Go-between 181 B. Law’s Oscillation 189 II. Law’s Morphological Plurality 193 A. The Gaze of the Jaguar 199 B. The Art of the Shaman 208 Before the Law: After Extinction? 215 Part III Economy and Ethics: Repairing the Split in the Oikos 5. Private International Neoliberal Legality 227 I. Toeing the Line 227 A. Debt and the Capture of Human Collateral 230 B. Foreign Investment and the ‘Capture of the Space of the International’ 236 C. Capital Structure and the Capture of Accountability 240 D. Development and the Capture of Time 247 II. Disembedding the Rule of Law 251 A. The Darwinian U-turn: A Brief but Giddy Detour 253 B. Autonomy as a Licence to Disembed 258 Reversal 267 6. An Ethic of Responsiveness: The Demands of Interalterity 269 I. The Appeal of the (Legal) Other 274 A. The Categories of Tolerance 277 B. The Social Construction of Acceptability (Ordre Public) 282 C. Wrongs of Rights 285 II. The Law of the Other 292 A. Responsibility and the Experience of Incommensurability 296 B. Hospitality and the De-centring of Self 301 Coalescence 309 7. Residue: Law’s Last Judgment: The Threshold of Our Responsibility 311 Bibliography 316 Index 339
Horatia Muir Watt is Professor at Sciences Po Law School, Paris, France.
Reviews for The Law's Ultimate Frontier: Towards an Ecological Jurisprudence: A Global Horizon in Private International Law
Lyrical and erudite ... This is courageous, committed work—a unique contribution in the best of the critical tradition. * Pierre Schlag, University Distinguished Professor and Byron R White Professor of Law, University of Colorado (Boulder) *
