Reckoning with Law in Excess
Reckoning with Law in Excess offers a ground-breaking approach to understanding the relationship between law and social and political transformation in a changing and uncertain world. The book's authors examine a wide range of case studies in which social movements pursue justice and social change within, against, and beyond the law. The interdisciplinary research at the heart of the volume reveals patterns in the ways in which law and legality are invested with heightened importance during certain historical moments, a process of over-loading that most often gives way to disenchantment with the ultimate limits of law. In reflecting critically and synthetically on these complicated dialectics of reckoning with law, the book shines a light on one of the most important, and consequential, dynamics in an era of climate crisis, rising populism across the political spectrum, and social conflict. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
- Showcases a critical orientation to the question of law's absence and presence within a wide range of contexts
- Offers a novel theoretical framework for making sense of the complicated relationship between law, social movements, and political conflicts
- Chapters are written by an international and interdisciplinary group of leading scholars and provide readers with diverse case studies, approaches, and arguments
- This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core
Product details
September 2025Paperback
9781009499590
300 pages
229 × 152 mm
Not yet published - available from September 2025
Table of Contents
- Introduction: social and political transformation within, against, and beyond the Law Mark Goodale and Olaf Zenker
- 1. Reckoning with transformative constitutionalism: land reform, expropriation without compensation and the iconic indexicality of post-apartheid South Africa Olaf Zenker
- 2. Beyond here lies somethin': juristocratic reckonings in two narratives of legalities Lynette J. Chua
- 3. After constitutionalism: current pathways of legal domination Julia Eckert and Kiri Santer
- 4. Re-presenting rights: food sovereignty and the struggle for postliberal democratic governance Matthew Canfield
- 5. Translocal dilemmas: social mobilization and justice-seeking beyond the boundaries of Law Mark Goodale
- 6. The enduring logic of mercy: humanitarianism and the eclipse of human rights Arzoo Osanloo
- 7. Law and the afterlives of Utopia: reckoning with pasts and futures in Berlin's housing movement Nitzan Shoshan
- 8. Plurinational juristocracy and rights from below at Bolivia's gas frontier Penelope Anthias
- 9. Law-washing the transitional state: the practice of property restitution in post-war Kosovo Agathe Mora
- 10. After judicialization? law, authoritarian regression, and the defense of indigenous life-worlds in Guatemala Rachel Sieder
- 11. 'A dead child is better than a missing one': religiosity, technology and aspirations for justice beyond law Kamari Clarke.