Translocal legalities: local encounters with transnational law

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship on transnational law has emphasised how the proliferation and fragmentation of normative orders, legal forms, and transnational actors are transforming the nature and authority of law in the contemporary global context. This Introduction presents what we term translocal legalities—emergent forms of normativity that are constituted through grounded encounters with local and transnational legal practices, discourses, subjectivities, and forms of resistance. By coining this new term, we seek to shift the gaze of transnational legal scholarship away from a top-down mapping of the structures of global law, to pay more attention to the situated forms of legality that are produced as legal norms from different scales and contexts circulate, interact, and encounter one another. Centring our analysis on the phenomenology of the encounter, we develop an analytical and empirical approach to understanding these encounters by focusing on how law is constituted not solely within traditional legal organisations and institutions, but through the everyday practices, discourses, and subjectivities of those mediating local, national and transnational norms.