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21 Ratio Juris 1 (2008)

handle is hein.journals/raju21 and id is 1 raw text is: Ratio Juris. Vol. 21 No. 1 March 2008 (1-18) Transnational Communities and the Concept of Law ROGER COTTERRELL* Abstract. The proliferation of forms of transnational regulation, often unclear in their relation to the law of nation states but also, in some cases, claiming authority as law, suggests that the concept of law should be reconsidered in the light of processes associated with globalisation. This article identifies matters to be taken into account in any such reconsideration: in particular, ideas of legal pluralism, of degrees of legalisation, and of relative legal authority. Regulatory authority should be seen as ultimately based in the diverse moral conditions of the networks of community which regulation serves. This article's concern is with globalisation and the concept of law. It asks: What is the significance of globalisation for legal theory's attempts to analyse the nature of law? Putting matters differently: Is it necessary to conceptualise law in new ways because of changes in the conditions and forms of regulation brought about by processes associated with globalisation? To invoke globalisation, however, is always problematic. To refer to it is to indicate a vast and indeterminate topic. Most often the term is taken to encompass a range of (possibly interrelated) changes in the nature of (i) transnational economic (commercial, financial, etc.) relations, (ii) popula- tion movements between countries, (iii) cultural influences, commitments and bonds, and (iv) processes of global communication. More specifically, it usually refers to claims about the increasing intensity and scale of these relations, movements and processes, and to a sense of the compression of global space and time, so that the transnational effects of events, situations and actions arise more quickly, directly and powerfully than in the past. * This article is based on the text of a paper given at a colloquium on Globalisation and the International Community at the University of London Institute in Paris on April 14, 2007. I am grateful especially to Andre-Jean Arnaud for valuable comments. © 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DO, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden 02148, USA.

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