Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality

Cambridge Studies in Law and Society

by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Editor), César A. Rodríguez-Garavito (Editor)

Written by leading scholars, these case studies represent an unprecedented attempt to analyze the role of the law in the global movement for social justice. They combine empirical research with innovative sociolegal theory to shed new light on a wide array of topics. Among the issues examined are the role of law and politics in the World Social Forum; the struggle on the anti-sweeping movement for the protection of international labor rights; and the challenge to neoliberal globalization and liberal human rights raised by grassroots movements in India and indigenous peoples around the world.

412 pages, Hardcover

First published September 7, 2001

About the author

Boaventura de Sousa Santos is Professor of Sociology, University of Coimbra (Portugal), and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned an LL.M and J.S.D. from Yale University and holds the Degree of Doctor of Laws, Honoris Causa, by McGill University.
He is director of the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra and has written and published widely on the issues of globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, social movements and the World Social Forum. He has been awarded several prizes, most recently the Science and Technology Prize of Mexico, 2010, and the Kalven Jr. Prize of the Law and Society Association, 2011.
His most recent project – ALICE: Leading Europe to a New Way of Sharing the World Experiences – was funded by an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (ERC), one of the most prestigious and highly competitive international financial institutes for scientific excellence in Europe. The project was initiated in July 2011 and ended in December 2016.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos has published widely on globalization, sociology of law and the state, epistemology, democracy, and human rights in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, French, German, Chinese, and Romanian.