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Reckoning with Law in Excess

Reckoning with Law in Excess

Reckoning with Law in Excess

Mobilization, Confrontation, Refusal
Mark Goodale, University of Lausanne
Olaf Zenker, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
September 2025
Not yet published - available from September 2025
Paperback
9781009499590
$44.99
USD
Paperback
USD
Hardback

    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 2025
    Paperback
    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.
      Contributors
    • Mark Goodale, Olaf Zenker, Lynette J. Chua, Julia Eckert, Kiri Santer, Matthew Canfield, Mark Goodale, Arzoo Osanloo, Nitzan Shoshan, Penelope Anthias, Agathe Mora, Rachel Sieder, Kamari Clarke

    • Editors
    • Mark Goodale , University of Lausanne

      Mark Goodale is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology and Director of the Laboratory of Cultural and Social Anthropology (LACS) at the University of Lausanne. One of the pioneers in the anthropology of human rights, he is the author or editor of a number of books on law, human rights, and justice, including Reinventing Human Rights (2022).

    • Olaf Zenker , Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

      Olaf Zenker is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. His research deals with political and legal issues such as statehood, bureaucracy, the rule of law, normative pluralities, inequality and justice. His latest book publications include Beyond Expropriation without Compensation: Law, Land Reform and Redistributive Justice in South Africa (2024).