Resumen de Law, polity and the legacy of statehood: An introduction

Neil Walker, Cormac Mac Amhlaigh, Cláudio Michelon

• This article introduces the Symposium on Law, Polity, and the Legacy of Statehood. The general aim of the Symposium is to identify and interrogate key background assumptions that shape contemporary debate and controversy over the relationship between legal normativity and political architecture. In particular, we seek to shed light upon the different suppositions and conjectures that inform analysis of the place of law as a source of institutional design and form of cultural expression within a state-centered framework in an age in which the position of the state within the global configuration is undergoing significant change. In so doing, we focus on three sets of factors which challenge the continuing centrality of the state-law paradigm within our governance architecture. These are the development of new forms of polity nesting within and beyond the state, the extension of transnational policy domain specialization, and the disembedding of certain frameworks of legal normativity from any and all polity settings.