EXPLORING LEGAL BORDERLANDS: INTRODUCING THE THEME

Resumo

The theme Exploring Legal Borderlands has been used as an inspiration for contemporary research at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS) at the University of Oxford since 2015, when Naomi Creutzfeldt and Petra Mahy organised a stream at the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Conference at the University of Warwick. Importantly, this research agenda remains relevant and a series of papers have been presented at the subsequent annual SLSA conferences in Lancaster (2016), Newcastle (2017), Bristol (2018), and more recently in Leeds (2019). In the last five years, various scholars presented their innovative interdisciplinary research at this stream and it remained organized by junior scholars affiliated with CSLS and the University of Oxford. However, the definition of legal borderlands was not provided in a clear statement. Legal borderlands, as understood in this issue, are about this ambiguity inherent in a world of multiple normative orders. The following issue’s originality consists in the conceptual exploration of the idea of legal borderlands. In an increasingly interconnected world of diverse and often conflicting normative orders, such research is particularly relevant. As far as it concerns this article, in addition to this introduction, Section II briefly examines the legal boundaries and the dichotomy between (il)legality and a-legality. Section III focuses on normative pluralism and the development of juridical orders. Section IV discusses global regulation as an expansion of legal borderlands. Section V brings concluding remarks and summarizes the articles that follow.