This article addresses the possible relevance of the spatial dimensions of Carl Schmitt's theoretical contribution to a regionalist model of international law focused upon large spaces (Grossraum). Does Schmitt's Grossraum analysis allow us to better understand today's situation, where it is not States considered as self-sufficient entities, but rather assemblages of States, brought together in regional power blocs, that are the central players within international relations, and hence creators and enforcers of transnational law? To answer this question, we need to consider the historical eclipse of the traditional model of the State, as well as the implications and possible contemporary relevance of Schmittian Grossraum analysis, particularly its theory of the spatial dimension of delimited territory as a central theme for international law scholarship. This study concludes with a series of generally constructive criticisms of Schmitt's work in this field.
In this wide-ranging collection of essays, major thinkers in the international legal field address the goals of the twenty-first century and how international law can address the needs of the world community.The result is a volume of outstanding scholarship that will appeal to all those – lawyers, political scientists, and educated laymen— interested in international law, legal theory, human rights, international investment law and commercial arbitration, boundary issues, law of the sea, and law of armed conflict.
The term transnational has had a strong impact in various corners of literary and cultural studies over the past decade, but is only now emerging as a significant category of analysis among Native American writers and critics and in Native American Studies. This essay grew out of a specific attempt to make some sense of why so many Native scholars in literary studies have steered clear of discourse on the transnational. It aims to provide a deeper understanding of how criticism fits into larger constellations of ethnic studies, politics, and culture.
As a field of practice, international human rights law (IHRL) is in constant motion. The four books under review explore the legal, political, and civic dynamics that continuously shape and reshape this vibrant area of law. In this Essay, I underscore two important trends in contemporary IHRL scholarship that these books highlight. First, these works share a strong emphasis on agency, understood as human action that makes a difference in the world, be it the agency of individuals, domestic civil society organizations, transnational organizations, or courts. Highlighting agency, rather than overarching political, economic, and social structures, in turn shifts the attention from human rights law and doctrine "in the books" to an understanding of human rights law as a purposive and dynamic practice.
Despite the importance of law in societal formations, and what looks like a revival in the field of legal studies, Islamic law is still by and large accessible to only a small group of specialists, and thus cannot claim a large audience even within Islamic and Middle (Near) Eastern studies, not to mention the much broader European and American legal scholarship. There are various reasons for such isolation, which are too complex to enumerate in a summary fashion, but which mostly involve the way the scholarship has evolved in the last few decades in Islamic societies, Europe, and North America, and which reflects the nature of Islamic law. First, unlike Roman law and all the continental codes that followed, and unlike the English and American common-law systems, what is commonly referred to as 'Islamic law' does not stand out as an organized set of codes, statutes, or even precedents. Instead, the body of Islamic law, which stretches over many centuries, has spawned several schools known as themadha̱hib, so that a modern scholar who needs to look at the legal framework of, say, an institution of the early 'Abba̱sid period would have to dig hard into the labyrinth of thefiqhmanuals only to realize that layers of interpretations follow each opinion, making it unrealistic to limit the 'law' to a set of codified norms. Second, modern scholars tend to look skeptically at the large corpus of Islamic law precisely because of its prescriptive nature and its uncertain historical evolution. We have consequently made little progress in assessing the nature of judicial decisionmaking and how the normative values prescribed by jurists affect it. Third, throughout the twentieth century, the majority of Islamic and Middle Eastern societies have adopted a new set of codes, a process that began in the second half of the previous century with Ottoman reforms, and which for the most part were derived from European civil-code systems. Since the implications of this rupture with the past have attracted little attention from scholars, the relevance of the classical legal systems is the biggest issue of concern here: will the transplanted systems utterly eclipse the various Islamic legal schools, or will there be a revival of the legal schools so as to make up for the inadequacies that result from the civil systems? Indeed, a lot needs to be done before more comprehensively elaborated codes are drafted, in particular in such domains as property, contract, and tort, which, under present conditions, seem like a hybrid mixture of Ottoman feudal practices and modern but poorly implemented Western notions.
