Samenvatting

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.