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Email: ralf.michaels@qmul.ac.ukPhone: +494041900451Room Number: Mile End Campus Surprisingly, what makes conflict of laws a better way to recognize and live up to the different dimensions of our hypothesis is to view conflict as a technique. In general, conflict can offer a new approach to feminism/cultural debate – if we treat its technical details not as a mere means to an end, but as an intellectual style. Replacing the typical picture of public law with the specificity and constraints of technical form offers a promising style for grasping, revealing and ultimately taking a stand on the complexity feminists face as multiculturalism is challenged at home and abroad. The approach of legal origins is discussed at length (footnote 51), but the countries discussed are all countries of the North; The criticism is exclusively methodical: selection of variables, degradation of legal culture, degradation of law. It`s strange because the theory is colonial from start to finish. Footnote 52 It is rooted in the idea that economic progress can be explained as a function of the legal system and that the colonies are a particularly good testing ground because they would have been subject to a random distribution of common law or civil law. The fact that this allocation took place by taxation is not discussed, nor is the question whether consequences for legal cultures in general can be drawn from it. Essentially, common law and civil law are compared to determine which of them was a better tool for colonization. This is not the specific fault of the NPLT authors; This is implicit in most of our legal considerations. NPLT presents these theories as they often claim to be.

The NPLT only pushes this absence further. However, the incompleteness of private law theories bodes ill for their extension to the rest of the world. The proposal to universalize such theories by extending them to the rest of the world amounts to a random attempt at epistemological colonization. This brings me to a second question. The authors, aware of the geographically limited scope of their theory, suggest that they “then test acceptance by the. the global legal community”Footnote 14 and hopes that “a hermeneutic circle of rich and divergent contributions will open.” Footnote 15 If the authors explicitly place themselves in the “hermeneutic tradition”, I presume that they are not referring to the relationship between a reader and a text, and not always to that between law and facts, Footnote 17, but to mutual observation, intercultural communication, mutual understanding. But is there a real circle? The publication of the book in English certainly allows a wider readership outside the German-speaking world, but even if the book finds readers outside the North – which will undoubtedly be the case – no circle is yet created. When the authors here speak to an audience in the Global South, they certainly do not name them, and they do not seem to be counting on the real contributions of this global South, at least at this stage; That should come later. This last project – and of course, I`m speculating again – could be the most interesting and successful. It is perhaps possible to discover the colonial origins of existing private law theory much better and more meticulously than I can do here. Such research could add a new external critique to the existing internal critiques of private law theory—from legal realism to LPE—that remain in the North-Modern project they criticize. That this is true, of course, should be proven.

And the question of whether there are Southern theorists who are not only capable of such a project, but also sufficiently interested in it, remains open. Perhaps, in my opinion, private law theory is simply not interesting enough outside of its own northern context. The suggestion that the theory “then tests the acceptance test by the . Global Legal Community” then raises a third question. Who is this “global legal community”? Do they even exist? Who is part of it? How does it work, how does it communicate? The existence of a global legal community has often been postulated. Niklas Luhmann explained law as necessarily global, as a subsystem of society – which he also understood as global. Footnote 18 Based on such theories, Mathias Albert proposed juridification as a means of organizing a global society. Footnote 19 Hauke Brunkhorst suggested that a global legal community could institutionalize democratic solidarity internationally. Footnote 20 Klaus Günther proposed a “universal code of legality”. Footnote 21 In addition to these sociological theories – yes, all by German authors – there are concrete legal proposals. International arbitrators can be understood as a global community of law; They certainly form a global epistemic community. Footnote 22 And Harold Berman`s proposals for a “universal law” are based on specific Catholic reasons and thus remind us of the original meaning of Catholic as all-encompassing.

Footnote 23 These images of a global community are all more or less images of the North. Can they encompass the countries of the South? The German Chancellor, the French President and the British Prime Minister each made headlines announcing that their countries` multiculturalism policies had failed. As is often the case, national debates on multiculturalism as well as foreign policy debates on human rights in non-Western countries revolve around the treatment of women. Yet feminists no longer even know how to formulate, let alone solve, the problems posed by obscuration, polygamy, and other cultural practices that oppress women by Western norms. Feminism has been confused by the concept of “culture”. This impasse undermines both women`s equality and concerns about cultural autonomy. In [almost all analyses of global legal pluralism] that I have encountered so far, I have always noticed that the author proceeds for some time according to the usual methods of reasoning and asserts [the existence of a “global legal pluralism”] or makes remarks on human affairs [of the “world Bukovina” on international human affairs]; When I am suddenly surprised to find that instead of the usual copulations of sentences, there is and there is not a sentence that is not related to a target or a homework.