Full Description
This collection brings together a carefully curated selection of researchers from law, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, social ontology and international relations, in order to examine how law and custom interact within specific material and spatial contexts.
Normativity develops within these contexts, while also shaping them. This complex relationship exists within all physical places from traditional agrarian spaces to the modern shifting post-industrial workplace. The contributions gathered together in this volume explore numerous examples of such spaces from different disciplinary perspectives to interrogate the dynamic relationship between custom and law, and the material spaces they inhabit. While there are a dynamic series of conclusions regarding this relationship in different material realities, a common theme is pursued throughout: a proper understanding of law and custom stems from their material locatedness within the power dynamics of particular spaces, which, in turn, are reflexively shaped by that same normativity. The book thus generates an account of the locatedness of law and custom, and, indeed, of custom as a source of law. In this way, it provides a series of linked explorations of normative spaces, but, more fundamentally, it also furnishes a cross-disciplinary toolkit of concepts and critical tools for understanding law and custom, and their relationship.
As the diversity of the contributors indicates, this book will be of great interest to legal theorists of different traditions, also legal historians and anthropologists, as well as sociologists, historians, geographers and developmental economists.
Contents
Introduction Part 1: Normative Spaces: Between Custom and Law 1. The Germ of Law (Christoph Kletzer) 2. The Ontology of Custom (Corrado Roversi) 3. Customary Law and Oral Law: an Impossible Equation? (Jean-Louis Halpérin) 4. The Legal Constitution of Custom: What the History of the Idea of Labour Law Teaches us about How Lawyers Should Understand Custom-Like Practices (Luke Mason) 5. The Hidden Structures of Company Customs (Olimpia Loddo) Part 2: Customary Law in Post-Colonial Spaces 6. Legal Regimes and The Structuration of Space (Marie Mellac) 7. The Building Up of Customary Land Law in New Caledonia (Pierre-Yves Le Meur) 8. Custom, Law and Social Change in New Caledonia (Oona Le Meur) 9. A Customary Law Written Down, Confronting State Law: The Case of the Rwa in Tanzania (Catherine Baroin) Part 3: Customary Law, Land and Property 10. The 'Law From Below', an Anthropological Approach to Custom and Customary Land Law (Jean-Pierre Jacob) 11. Customary Law, Anarchic Orders and Property Rights (Marc Goetzmann) 12. Property, Spatial Status and Boundaries: Agreement and Conflicts, Examples from the French Provence From the Ancien Régime to Now (Ada Acovitsioti-Hameau and Philippe Hameau) 13. Land Law and Irrigation in the Mountains of North Vietnam: Diversity of Social Regulation Systems, Between the Legal and the Customary (Emmanuel Pannier).
