From Transnational Relations to Transnational Laws: Northern European Laws at the Crossroads

This set of highly instructive and insightful case studies of transnational personal, social, religious and economic relations in Northern Europe is at the cutting edge of sociolegal analysis of the ambiguous outcomes of gender, class and status in this age of accelerated mobility of people, technologies and normative systems. Abdullahi A. An-Na'im, Emory University Law School, USA

This is an original critical accounting of legal pluralism as nationalist discourse, read in light of new transnational realities across Northern Europe. The regional focus thickens the analysis - in the process unsettling conceptual boundaries, remixing institutions and intimate lives, and deepening the implications for contemporary studies of law and society. Carol J. Greenhouse, Princeton University, USA

To speak about law is always and necessarily to be engaged in a discourse about both justice and power. While law's relationship to justice is everywhere contingent and uncertain, law completely divorced from power is unthinkable. And, while law need not be virtuous to be law, if it had no effect in the world it could hardly be said to merit the name law. Recognizing these facts, the series on Law, Justice and Power takes a broad view of legal scholarship. It publishes books by social scientists, humanists and legal academics which connect an understanding of culture's normative ideals with examination of the complex ways that law works in the world, insist that justice is inseparable from social practices and analyze law as one form of power, one way of constituting, controlling and changing the social world. It focuses on state law as well as law in communities and cultural practices and on identities and their articulation in and through law, on law's power in the taken-for-granted world, on its role in the complex construction of nation and national power and on global developments which today destabilize and transform the meaning and significance of law. The series invites innovative scholarship that crosses disciplinary as well as geographic and temporal boundaries.

Anne Hellum is a Professor of Law in the Department of Public and International Law at the University of Oslo, and co-editor of several books including Human Rights: Plural Legalities and Gendered Realities (Weaver Press, 2007). Shaheen Sardar Ali is a Professor in the School of Law at the University of Warwick, and author of Gender and Human Rights in Islam and International Law: Equal Before Allah, Unequal Before Man? (Kluwer, 2000). Anne Griffiths is a Professor in the School of Law at Edinburgh University and co-editor of books including Spatializing Law: An Anthropological Geography of Law in Society (Ashgate, 2009).