Out of Site: Transnational Legal Culture(s)

Since the inadequacy of the traditional theoretical frameworks for the study of the “global transformation of modernity” (Beck) was becoming more and more evident in the last decades of the twentieth century, “culture” has figured prominently in many literatures that engage with the post-national condition. Yet in legal academia, despite studying similar phenomena of displacement, fragmentation and hybridization, cultural analysis perspectives have traditionally played a rather marginal role in the discourse on globalization and transnationalization. Although some authors have indeed attempted to operationalize the concept of culture in grappling with effects of legal globalization, the emerging field of “transnational law” never took a significant “cultural turn”. This chapter retraces this disciplinary development and reflects on the use of “culture” in transnational law discourse. While not advocating a more prominent role for the notoriously difficult concept of culture, this brief survey serves as a reminder that the same substantive and theoretical choices that kept transnational law from drawing more heavily on cultural analysis and traditional, “social fact” legal pluralism also may limit its scope and create theoretical blind spots. Not determined by a distinct “body of law” but rather understood as a developing discourse within a discipline in the process of coming into its own, transnational law and its gatekeepers have to decide just how methodologically and substantively inclusive, interdisciplinary, and critical they want it to be.