This text seeks to situate sociolegal studies in a global context. Law and society scholarship in the United States and elsewhere typically assumes one legal system and one society and explores the relationship between them. Such a narrow endeavor perpetuates a Western international relations model that too often conflates law, culture, and the nation-state. A more global sociolegal perspective engages with multiple laws and societies within and across national borders and recognizes diverse sociolegal systems based on very different historical and cultural traditions, interacting on multiple local, national, and global levels. This more global perspective also reveals an array of transnational issues including regional conflicts, genocide, mass immigration, environmental degradation, and climate change that have consistently defied resolution via conventional international system of governance. The approach to global legal pluralism outlined here seeks to provide a framework for envisioning new global governance regimes that move beyond state-based solutions to deal with trenchant transnational challenges.

Product Description: Ethnographies of law are historically associated with anthropology adn the study of far-away places and people. In contrast, this volume underscores the importance of ethnographic research in analyzing law in all societies, particularly complex developed nations.

In a study that is original and timely, Eve Darian-Smith uses the Channel Tunnel between England and France to explore the shifting geographies of nationalism, postcolonialism, and legal autonomy in the formation of the European Union. Conducting ethnographic research in Kent, the county at the English mouth of the Tunnel, she looks at regional differences in feelings about Europe and at the vocabulary used in discussing the Tunnel. Visual representations—political cartoons, photographs, etchings—regarding the Tunnel are also examined.Two hundred years after Napoleon planned to invade England via a tunnel, the completion in 1994 of a fast rail link between Great Britain and the European mainland symbolizes the disintegration of conventional state borders. While the Tunnel precariously affirms the ideal of a united Europe, it also brings to the fore questions of boundaries between the first and third worlds, colonizers and colonized, and the "East" and the "West." Bridging Divides is about much more than an engineering feat. By exploring historical narratives, tunnel stories, and legal myths, Darian-Smith's study shows the interconnections between people's memories of the past and current history.

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