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Social & Legal Studies
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Contributions to a Post-Sovereigntist Understanding of Law: Foucault, Law as Governance, and Legal Pluralism

Kevin Walby

Carleton University, Canada

This article proposes an understanding of law that goes beyond the popular association of law with sovereignty, constitutionalism and representative political institutions. By drawing on insights provided by the law as governance and `non-essentialist version of legal pluralism' approaches, the focus is on retrieving the specificity of plural legal and normative ordering strategies. The law as governance approach proposes a modest role for law where law is conceived as connectively situated among a multiplicity of other constitutive modes of regulation. The `non-essentialist version of legal pluralism' is a conventionalist rearticulation of the hitherto unproblematized tradition of legal pluralism. Comparing the law as governance and `non-essentialist version of legal pluralism' approaches contributes to a post-sovereigntist understanding of law. A post-sovereigntist understanding of law focuses on the state as a site for the unification of regulatory projects, but, inspired by Michel Foucault's later works, finds it important to place analyses of law within the context of a decentered economy of productive power and extensive government. This post-sovereigntist understanding not only provides a clearer depiction of the way legal and normative ordering and their interrelations work in the everyday, but raises questions regarding the future of legal pluralism in socio-legal theory.

Key Words: Foucault • governance • Hunt • law • legal pluralism • post/sovereignty • Tamanaha

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Social & Legal Studies, Vol. 16, No. 4, 551-571 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0964663907082735
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This Article
Right arrow Abstract Freely available
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What's this?