Theorizing as Activity: Transnational Legal Theory in Context

Abstract

This paper is written for a collection of essays in honour of Professor William Twining, by all accounts a trailblazer in legal theory and jurisprudence, human rights and legal pluralism, legal education and transnational legal thought. The paper engages with a number of Professor Twining’s many themes throughout his comprehensive oeuvre from the perspective of ‘theory in action’. Inspired by his practice of drawing his students’ attention to different manifestations of law and ‘law’ in a single edition of a newspaper, the following comments relate to the manifestations of law/‘law’ as well as to what Professor Twining refers to as ‘normative’ and ‘legal pluralism’ in a now undoubtedly global context. At the centre of the here presented analysis is an engagement with his work on the challenges arising for legal research and legal education from globalization, which forces us to rethink the legal relevancy of “facts” from the ground up. In this vein, this paper is a continuation of reflections that found their expression in a 2014 essay for No Foundations, entitled Law & Society and the Politics of Relevance: Facts and Fields Boundaries in ‘Transnational Legal Theory in Context’.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.