Introduction

Let us recall from our introductory discussion of the multifaceted character of globalisation that the globalisation of law, just like the globalisation of politics, or the economy, or culture, or any other dimension of social life, follows a relatively autonomous course. Law interacts closely with all these other dimensions. And when we come in Chapter 3 to discuss some of the wider globalising impulses that have infiltrated our imagination of legal order and affected our conceptions of legal doctrine, so feeding the various new species of global law, we will observe a wide range of causal influences acting upon law from the outside. But if we are to take the relative autonomy of legal globalisation seriously, we must also attend to the reasons why and the ways in which it follows a distinctive path and makes a distinctive contribution. One part of the answer has to do with historical features of legal ordering and legal dogmatics. Many areas of modern social organisation, even against the backdrop of increasing access to a global range of lifestyles and practices, continue to be deeply recursive, exploiting past experience and tried and tested knowledge and taking advantage of embedded conventions of behaviour and existing patterns of consensus or acquiescence. Given that the very validity of law as law has always also been closely bound to its settled pre-existence and so to its past embeddedness, however, the historical record of law remains a particularly significant resource in accounting for its global articulation. Conversely, however, global law is equally distinctive – equally tied to its own peculiar logic and autonomous of outside forces – in its emphasis on future projection, and in how it grasps the present as part of that projection.

The matter of global law's peculiar relationship to time, and how this is reflected in its ‘intimated’ quality, is one we will also return to and develop in some depth. In the present chapter, however, we will focus not upon the deep past or upon the near future of law, but on another element that accounts for its relatively autonomous globalising trajectory: namely, the ‘inside world’ of contemporary professional and academic practice.