The question whether and how boundaries might individuate legal orders and in this way be constitutive features thereof has yet to be addressed in a systematic and comprehensive manner by legal and political theory. The book seeks to address this important omission, providing an original contribution to the debate about law in a global setting. Against the widely endorsed assumption that we are now moving towards law without boundaries, it argues that every imaginable legal order, global or otherwise, is bounded in space, time, membership, and content. In effect, legal orders are a form of joi ... More

The question whether and how boundaries might individuate legal orders and in this way be constitutive features thereof has yet to be addressed in a systematic and comprehensive manner by legal and political theory. The book seeks to address this important omission, providing an original contribution to the debate about law in a global setting. Against the widely endorsed assumption that we are now moving towards law without boundaries, it argues that every imaginable legal order, global or otherwise, is bounded in space, time, membership, and content. In effect, legal orders are a form of joint action in which authorities mediate and uphold who ought to do what, where, and when in order to realise the normative point of acting together. The book also argues that behaviour can call into question the boundaries of a legal order: a-legality. When questioned by a-legal behaviour, boundaries appear as limits that reveal excluded practical possibilities which remain within the range of possibilities accessible to the collective. Legal boundaries appear as fault lines when a-legal behaviour intimates an order which exceeds the range of possibilities accessible to that collective. Careful analysis of a wide range of legal orders, including nomadism, classical international law, multinationals, cyberlaw, lex mercatoria, and a global regime of human rights validates this thesis. Arguing that legal and political theories misunderstand how legal boundaries do their work of including and excluding, the book concludes by outlining a normative theory of legal order that is alternative to both communitarianism and cosmopolitanism.