The postmodern normative anxiety of transnational legal studies: the challenge of legal rematerialization beyond the nation-state

This chapter seeks to establish whether a normative discourse on law’s legitimacy can be successfully reconstructed in the face of law’s increasing transnationalization. It explores the postmodern normative conundrum of transnational legal studies, highlighting the normative dilemmas of both Transnational Legal Pluralism and Transnational Legal Ordering theory. It then puts forward an alternative framing of “transnational law” and “transnational legal analysis”; this opens up new opportunities for an inquiry into law’s legitimacy through an application of Conflicts Law theory. After an overview of the merits of Conflicts Law, the chapter assesses the limits to its successful application. An inner tension exists between Conflicts Law theory’s modernist foundations and its application to increasingly complex legal and regulatory conflicts in the postmodern landscape. Against this overall backdrop, the chapter advocates a turn back to substantive, purposive forms of normativity and the rematerialization of law beyond the nation-state.