Reckoning with Law in Excess

Mobilization, Confrontation, Refusal

Mark Goodale, Olaf Zenker

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Law
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009499583
• Subtopic: Jurisprudence
• Index: Law

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Imprints page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Note on the Text
• Introduction: Social and Political Transformation within, against, and beyond the Law
• 1 Reckoning with Transformative Constitutionalism: Land Reform, Expropriation Without Compensation, and the Iconic Indexicality of Post-apartheid South Africa
• 2 Beyond Here Lies Somethin’: Juristocratic Reckonings in Two Narratives of Legalities
• 3 After Constitutionalism: Current Pathways of Legal Domination
• 4 Re-presenting Rights: Food Sovereignty and the Struggle for Postliberal Democratic Governance
• 5 Translocal Dilemmas: Social Mobilization and Justice-Seeking beyond the Boundaries of Law
• 6 The Enduring Logic of Mercy: Humanitarianism and the Eclipse of Human Rights
• 7 Law and the Afterlives of Utopia: Reckoning with Pasts and Futures in Berlin’s Housing Movement
• 8 Plurinational Juristocracy and Rights from Below at Bolivia’s Gas Frontier
• 9 Law-Washing the Transitional State: The Practice of Property Restitution in Postwar Kosovo
• 10 After Judicialization?: Law, Authoritarian Regression, and the Defense of Indigenous Life-Worlds in Guatemala
• 11 ‘‘A Dead Child Is Better than a Missing One’’: Religiosity, Technology, and Aspirations for Justice beyond Law
• Index