The concept of transnationalism refers to border-crossing activities and social relations, such as family relations, migration, international trade and international organisations. It is argued that transnationalism is an important topic in the sociology of law for three reasons: the transnationalisation of law (laws travel across borders), the law under transnationalism (transnational processes affect law) and classic socio-legal themes may gain a new and exciting lease of life when used in a transnational context. Transnationalism touches on the core of the sociology of law: studying the relation between law and society and the social working of law. Socio-legal scholars should look beyond the national borders, include non-state actors in their analysis and take notice of how rules are used in different localities.

This paper presents a reflection on the theoretical work on the social working of law of the past two decades. It is argued that early assumptions, that legal models were becoming increasingly globalised, creating an increasingly uniform body of law, have not come true. The global spread of neo-capitalism has not only given rise to de-juridification, it has also engendered juridification in which ever more sectors of social life, from small scale to global, are being colonised by law. This development is initiated from above and below in equal measure, and concerns not only the law of nation states, but also law created by other actors, including religious law of various provenance. The paper argues that great progress has been made in understanding how transnational law is generated and how law is transnationalised, but that the ways in which these processes work when actors actually use this transnationalised law in contexts of legal pluralism are not yet adequately understood. The paper presents a perspective on transnationalisation of law that is grounded in space, a perspective that may aid our understanding of the social working of law in transnational contexts. The first section provides a brief survey of some of the main academic approaches to processes of transnationalisation. The second section addresses the issue of location and considers what happens in settings where actors use transnationalising law. The conclusions discuss the value of transnational space and transnational legal space as concepts for the analysis of transnationalising law.

In order to establish and evaluate the significance of changing socio-legal boundaries and how these are mirrored in citizenship, cross-border formations of the social and citizenship rules must be discussed. The first part of this paper deals with changes in social boundaries across state borders and presents three generations of transnational studies. Based on this, the second part asks how legal boundaries have changed in the case of dual citizenship and supranational social citizenship. Citizenship is a particularly important issue because it sits at the intersection of social and legal boundaries. There is a growing tolerance toward dual citizenship and the evolution of supranational citizenship, one in which migrants enjoy a transnational life that is supported by the implementation of human rights principles in national constitutions, legislation and in European Union court rulings.

In transnational Dutch-Moroccan divorce cases, spouses can come into contact with two different legal systems. Many different kinds of organisations are involved, offering social and legal advice and aid in these transnational divorces: advising and referring clients, educating spouses and professionals, and influencing policy. In this article these organisations are analysed as participants in a transnational field of legal aid, using Moore’s concept of the semi-autonomous social field. It becomes clear that these organisations share norms on transnational divorce: they frame transnational divorce as a women’s problem, and one of complex, interacting rules and regulations. These norms form the source of rules on how to handle law in transnational Dutch-Moroccan divorce cases.

For a common market, a common patent and a common patent litigation seem self-evident. Although efforts to introduce these common market institutions in Europe started early in the history of the Economic Community, they remained unsuccessful. The reconstruction of this legal history is focused on two theoretical issues.The first concerns the question of power and influence in the EU, in particular the configuration of stakeholders responsible for the non-decision making on this policy issue. The basic mechanism underlying the lack of success of this dossier appears to be a balance of power between the two opposing groups of stakeholders (France and European institutions vs. Germany, UK, supported by their patenting industry and legal experts). This suggests that transnational rule making, proceeding under similar conditions, is likely to have a long (if not unsuccessful) ‘issue career’.The second theoretical issue concerns the agenda-setting mechanisms of recent decades. All initiatives on international or transnational patent policy have mainly been the product of ‘high politics’, although the input of patent legal experts (representatives of ‘low politics’) has increased considerably in recent decades. Further, this history would seem to defy simple schemes of agenda setting. There is no simple sequence of issue initiation, specification, expansion and entrance. At best, it is a series of such sequences.

Transnationalism and migration are recognised contributors to legal pluralism. Scholars of legal pluralism state that in conflicts, social actors sustain their claims with arguments from coexisting legal systems. They manoeuvre between different legal systems, or contradicting norms within one system, to achieve the most satisfactory decision in a conflict. In doing so, they use norms as discursive tools. Indeed, according to data on domestic workers in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, this manoeuvring with norms as discursive tools is often recognisable in conflicts between workers and their employers. However, transnational contractual norms and the legal pluralism they create are not merely discursive tools in existing conflicts; they are also regularly the cause of conflicts. Domestic workers conclude agreements with agents in their countries of origin, while employers conclude agreements with different agents in the destination countries. Both parties believe the other party has signed the same contract, while in reality that is not the case. Because of the differences between the two sets of contractual norms, these norms cause conflicts; they are not merely discursive tools. This finding calls for a division between different types of conflicts, which is proposed here for the purpose of socio-legal analysis of conflicts in general and particularly in situations of transnationalism and legal pluralism.

In recent years, West European supermarkets have been playing an active role in the global regulation of food safety. They have developed several transnational food safety standards and compelled suppliers of food products around the world to acquire certification under these standards. Why and how did supermarkets do this? This article explores the emergence and evolution of transnational supermarket standards by analyzing the development of GlobalGAP, one of the most commonly implemented supermarket standards on farms throughout the world. In the literature, the emergence of transnational regulation is often attributed to one or two factors that play an important role at a particular moment in time. The main argument made in this article is that the emergence of transnational supermarket standards is best understood when it is studied as a process. The development of GlobalGAP includes four main characteristics which may be helpful in analyzing the emergence of other transnational private standards.

In this feature authors review recently published books on subjects of interest to readers of Recht der Werkelijkheid.