Lecture 7 of the Globalization of Law Lecture Series, themed “Globalization of Law from the Bottom Up,” offered by the Institute for International and Area Studies (IIAS) of Tsinghua University in the fall semester 2022-23, was delivered online November 18, 2022. The lecture was presented by Lu Nan, associate professor at Tsinghua University Law School and member of the Teaching Committee of the IIAS, and moderated by Ding Chenxi, Assistant Professor at IIAS. Scholars and students from universities in both China and beyond, including researchers and doctoral students of the IIAS, as well as other people interested in related topics attended the online lecture.
This lecture is divided into four parts: Globalization from the Perspective of Legal Anthropology, Pasargada Law and “Asphalt Law”, Globalization of Law from the Bottom Up and from the Top Down, and Reconstruction of Regulation and Emancipation from the Perspective of Oppositional Postmodernism. Professor Lu began the lecture by introducing legal anthropologists’ conception of law from six aspects, including law in “local knowledge,” legal pluralism, marginalized groups, and bottom-up observation. Professor Lu believes that to build connections between legal research and regional and country studies, we need to examine research questions from the perspective of legal anthropology. Then, he briefly introduced B. de Sousa Santos’ research and book Toward a New Legal Common Sense, especially the fourth chapter “The Law of the Oppressed: The Construction and Reproduction of Legality in Pasargada.” Santos is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Law.
In the second part of the lecture, Professor Lu expounded the definition and implications of Pasargada law. He introduced the origin of the name of Pasargada which is a fictional utopia. Santos sees Pasargada as a “crack” in the blueprint of globalization as well as a land of hope for a shift to the paradigm of oppositional postmodernism. Professor Lu first recounted his research trip to India before elaborating on the different social order in the slum of Pasargada. Santos believes that the slum has an unofficial legal system—Pasargada law—centered on the Residents’ Association, which is an autonomous organization in the community. The official law (the “asphalt law”, as it is called in Pasargada) competes and coexists with the informal law of Pasargada. Professor Lu then explained concepts such as Pasargada law and the law of emancipation and discussed the causes behind the emergence of Pasargada law. He believes Santos intends to encourage “opposition,” or the creation of an entirely new, tit-for-tat discourse of emancipation in response to the increasingly caste-oriented nature of globalization.
In the third part of the lecture, Professor Lu introduced two types of globalization of law, top-down and bottom-up, and discussed their respective characteristics and three dimensions (local, national, and global). He then discussed Santos’ views about the problems in the two types of globalization of law. Santos believes that with the expansion of Western modernity and the coupling of capitalism and modernity, regulation has gradually supplanted liberation. At the regulatory level, people increasingly believe that highly scientific laws can achieve social harmony and order through purely technical language. However, behind this phenomenon is exploitation and oppression of specific groups. At the same time, the three legal reform programs—the liberal reform program, the democratic socialist reform program, and the socialist reform program—failed. Thus, Santos believes that the emancipatory potential of legal modernity is facing the risk of exhaustion.
In the fourth part of the lecture, Professor Lu introduced Santos’ three unthinkings and the five pillars of cosmopolitan law, and explained the implications of the above concepts. He pointed out that Santos pays special attention to ecological socialism, and he expects that the potential of ecological socialism will be further unlocked in the era of globalization, changing not only the political and legal structure of developed countries, but also the path of modernization of developing countries. Then, Professor Lu shared his views on Santos’ theory and discussed the potential of modernity, the institutional foundation of oppositional postmodernism, how to avoid the paradox of revolution and reconstruct regulation and emancipation.
In the Q&A session following the lecture, Professor Lu had a heated discussion with the teachers and students about Santos’ bottom-up perspective, how to combine fieldwork and empirical laws, and the relationship between the bottom-up approach to law-making and modernization of global law.
Lu Nan, associate professor of Tsinghua University School of Law and member of the Training Steering Committee of the IIAS, has a Juris Doctor degree from Tsinghua University Law School. His areas of interest include comparative law, legal culture, legal theory, and sociology of law. Dr. Lu has published many papers and articles, including “Advantages and Disadvantages of Comparative Law in the Age of Globalization,” “The WJP Rule of Law Index: Origin and Evolution,” “The Status and Role of Non-Western Cultures in Comparative Law Teaching and Research,” and “The Invisible Commercial Law: New Trends in Legal Transplantation in the Era of Globalization,” and edited a number of books including Discover Comparative Law, Handbook of Jurisprudence, and Globalization of Law: China and the World.
Text editor: Ding Ruilin
Typography editor: Cheng Yao
Proofreaders: Dong Hui and Ding Chenxi
