Boston College Law School

Abstract: The JGLR aspires to serve as a significant platform “for developing an alternative vision” on the discourse “of” and “about” law in the Global South. Even the process of publication underlines this global approach. With articles written in Argentina, South Africa, India, and Nigeria, as well as France, England, and the United States–and edited in China, Thailand, and Australia, among other sites–the JGLR tilts the debate on globalization towards its reality as a robust process that is multidirectional, reciprocal, and recursive. In ...

This chapter asks how best to frame a field of study called "transnational art law" (TAL). If art law encompasses all legal aspects of the production, distribution, and transaction of art, as well as any other rights and obligations governing art world actors and works of art, then transnational art law is the framework of legal knowledge necessary to understand these relationships and transactions across borders. Following the Transnational Law framework proposed by Philip Jessup in 1956, TAL would not be restricted to public or private, national or international, substantive or procedural law, but intervene in problem spaces involving all of these. It would capture the transnational actors, norms, and processes, the formal and informal interactions that constitute the art world. This chapter sketches TAL in its possible doctrinal, policy, regulatory, and advocacy dimensions, and suggests some openings for interdisciplinary study in particular.

his is an epilogue to a volume commemorating 60 years since Philip Jessup’s “definition” of Transnational Law. Unsurpassed for its citablity and quotability, Jessup's concept was nonetheless formed within a particular context of intellectual history. It has inspired three intellectual projects, called here Transnational Legal Process, Transnational Legal Theory and Transnational Legal Orders. This book is most clearly a mapping and an itinerary of the middle category, Transnational Legal Theory. The distance traveled between Jessup’s conception and the one presented here is most evident in a new definition offered in the Introduction by its editor which rather than acting as a prompt or a distillation, is an unpacking of the essential features of Transnational Law as an critical and intellectual project. Along with its rival itineraries, its moves toward interdisicplinarity, criticality, and legal pluralism move us not towards a consensus concept, but a transdisciplinary horizon.

This Article, a contribution to the Symposium Meting Out Justice: Fairness and Finality in the Death Penalty (Spring 2001) argues that in the United States, debates over capital punishment are increasingly influenced by victim's rights movements seeking to reshape the criminal justice system in ways that individual victims may experience closure. While legislation, policies, and a proposed Constitutional Amendment broadly confirm the internalization of victim-centered notions of closure, the impact on death penalty debates has been ambivalent. This is because victim's rights movements are themselves divided between those proposing vengeance or mercy as routes to "closure." This Article criticizes the former group and cautions to the latter, urging skepticism toward any expectation that meaningful closure might be achieved through the limited means of the criminal justice system.

The JGLR aspires to serve as a significant platform “for developing an alternative vision” on the discourse “of” and “about” law in the Global South. Even the process of publication underlines this global approach. With articles written in Argentina, South Africa, India, and Nigeria, as well as France, England, and the United States – and edited in China, Thailand, and Australia, among other sites – the JGLR tilts the debate on globalization towards its reality as a robust process that is multidirectional, reciprocal, and recursive. In every case, the contributors offer original research of the highest order in diverse fields of inquiry, raising issues of the global transmission of legal knowledge and authority. Although the present volume was not originally intended to be a “thematic” issue, we have titled it to note the various ways that these articles perform or remark upon The Globalization of Legal Knowledge.