What’s a palace? In search of the vulnerable edifices of transnational sovereignty

This issue marks the beginning of volume 12 of Transnational Legal Theory. When it was launched in 2010, the editorial note to its first issue set out the stakes in an ambitious and hopeful manner. Comparing TLT to ‘une salle polyvalente’ the founding, convening editor Craig Scott of Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto sketched the journal’s scope in conceptual and architectonic terms. Describing it as ‘pluralistically minded’, he depicted its project as a collaborative architectonic undertaking to which the journal’s launch invited ‘everyone’ to join in. Twelve ‘volumes’, and 54 issues later, we all get to look back at the immensely rich edifice that has been evolving over time. A Palast im Vorübergehen, as Paul Klee named one of his most captivating pictures in 1928, represents the intriguing tension of a building that is not confined to a completed physical structure but, instead, confronts us with its origins and visible appearances and futures all at once. It manages to intertwine the now—allegedly —better understood past, and the still unknown tomorrow by representing an edifice in motion, pulled into different directions, swaying between concrete, physical manifestation and endlessly contested options. Just like ‘sovereignty’, Klee’s Palast is a track record of usurpation and domination, of imposition and extermination, and of thunderous trumpets and silenced cries. But, at the same time, the image is also an ever so light allusion to one or more alternatives, to new architectures and designs, arising in accordance with different principles, that suggest the possibility of a different future, maybe even a better one. Klee’s image of a building is so fitting for our reflection as it forces us to take stock of what has been done, what was and is being built, what is being put in motion and being unleashed, day after day. A building prompts questions regarding its architects but also its builders and its inhabitants. As such, it asks us to engage with the respective places and roles held by everyone in relation to the building. In comparison with Klee’s Eros of 1923, Palast aims