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.
Horatia Muir Watt is Professor at Sciences Po Law School, Paris, France.
Preface vIntroduction: Inklings 1I. Nature as Alterity in Legal Form 5II. Nature, Legality and Natural Law 8III. Law, Bios and Bare Life 13IV. Globalisation: A Very Short Story 14V. The ‘Old Settlement’ and the Legal Summa Divisio 15VI. Caveats: Law and Nomos; Lex and Ius 20VII. Private International Law and its Double Scenography 23VIII. Law’s Residues and the Shadow Story 28IX. Bricolage, Interdisciplinarity and Method 29X. What is Ecological about this Alternative Jurisprudential Design? 31XI. Plan and Project 31Part IEpistemology and Genealogy: Struggling for the Soul of MethodI. An Initial Glimpse: Private International Law and its Inner Conflicts 45II. An Example: Cross-Border Environmental Litigation 46III. Down to Earth: Punctum 50IV. Bird’s-Eye View: Studium 56V. The Stakes in Method 61A. Monism vs Pluralism and Theories of Truth 61B. The Ecological Nature of Method 63C. Approaching Alterity in Legal Form 65Nature at the Stake 681. The Story of Origin 69I. Genealogy and Methodology 71A. The Consensual Tale 72B. Frictions and Contradictions 77II. Myth and Legacy 84A. The Domestic Front: Irrelevance 85B. The International Front: Self-Isolation 90The Return of the Repressed 942. The Shadow Account 96I. Dialectical Tensions 99A. Paradigm Dichotomies 101B. Nesting 104II. Competing Imaginaries 107A. State/Non-State 110B. Law and Fact 118C. Foreign/Domestic 124Eclosion 129Part IIAesthetics and Ontology: Constructing the Nomos of the In-Between3. Jurisdictional Jurisprudence 141I. Topos and Telos 145A. Territoriality as Natural Description 147B. Territoriality as Value Judgement 152II. Sovereignty 156A. The Law of Laws 158B. The Status of the Exception 166Transition(s) 1714. A Jurisprudence of the Border 172I. A ‘Juridical Ecology of Ligatures’ 178A. Law as Go-between 181B. Law’s Oscillation 189II. Law’s Morphological Plurality 193A. The Gaze of the Jaguar 199B. The Art of the Shaman 208Before the Law: After Extinction? 215Part IIIEconomy and Ethics: Repairing the Split in the Oikos5. Private International Neoliberal Legality 227I. Toeing the Line 227A. Debt and the Capture of Human Collateral 230B. Foreign Investment and the ‘Capture of the Space of the International’ 236C. Capital Structure and the Capture of Accountability 240D. Development and the Capture of Time 247II. Disembedding the Rule of Law 251A. The Darwinian U-turn: A Brief but Giddy Detour 253B. Autonomy as a Licence to Disembed 258Reversal 2676. An Ethic of Responsiveness: The Demands of Interalterity 269I. The Appeal of the (Legal) Other 274A. The Categories of Tolerance 277B. The Social Construction of Acceptability (Ordre Public) 282C. Wrongs of Rights 285II. The Law of the Other 292A. Responsibility and the Experience of Incommensurability 296B. Hospitality and the De-centring of Self 301Coalescence 3097. Residue: Law’s Last Judgment: The Threshold of Our Responsibility 311Bibliography 316Index 339
Horatia Muir Watt’s exquisitely researched and documented book is a tour de force.