Description: This book offers a path-breaking, empirically grounded theory that reframes the study of law and society. It shifts research from a predominantly national context to one that places transnational, national, and local lawmaking and practice within a single, coherent, analytic frame. By presenting and elaborating a new concept, transnational legal orders, Halliday and Shaffer present an original approach to legal orders that affect fundamental economic and social behaviors. The contributors generate arrays of hypotheses about how transnational legal orders rise and fall, where they compete and cooperate, and how they settle and unsettle. This original theory is applied and developed by distinguished scholars from North America, Europe, and Asia in business law (taxation, corporate bankruptcy, secured transactions, transport of goods by sea), regulatory law (monetary and trade, finance, food safety, climate change), and human rights law (civil and political rights, rule of law, right to health/access to medicines, human trafficking, criminal accountability of political leaders).
Brief description: Terence C. Halliday is a codirector of the Center on Law and Globalization and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. He is the author or editor of numerous books on professions, globalization, law, markets, and politics. His articles have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, the British Journal of Sociology, the Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, and the Asian Journal of Law and Society. He is the winner of multiple prizes from the American Sociological Association for his 2009 book Bankrupt (with Bruce Carruthers). Halliday is the 2013 recipient of the Podgerecki Prize for distinguished scholarship from the International Sociological Association's Research Committee on the Sociology of Law.
Review Quotes: 'Halliday and Shaffer's volume seeks to shift socio-legal research from a predominantly national context to a theoretical perspective that places transnational, national, and local law-making and practice within a single, coherent, analytic frame - that of 'transnational legal orders'. Contributors generate hypotheses about how transnational legal orders rise and fall, where they compete and cooperate, and how they settle and unsettle.' Law and Social Enquiry