We have word of a new law journal at the University of Michigan, the Michigan Journal of Law and Society, which “promises to blend the best of both worlds in law and society scholarly publishing with both a level of peer review and the publication speed and insights that come with student editing.” It has issued a call for papers on “Sovereignty, States, and Inclusion”:
-Dan ErnstIn “Politics as a Vocation” (1918), Max Weber defines the state as a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” Much has changed since 1918, as has our understanding of sovereignty.
Scholarship at the nexus of law and social science has grappled with the implications of global integration across many dimensions: national identity, territorial boundaries, regulatory autonomy, socioeconomic and human rights, and integrity of democratic processes, among many others. In the last decade, some scholars went so far as to declare sovereignty a thing of the past, while others continue to insist that it is the central organizing principle of our world. Still others argue that for many of the world’s developing countries, sovereignty has always been illusory.
Given these contrary developments, some suggest that, despite its alleged crisis, national sovereignty retains a great deal of discursive and prescriptive power. The imagined national community continues to structure institutional logics both within and beyond the nation-state. This issue asks writers and reviewers to think critically about the meaning of both sovereignty and the state, broadly conceived. We are interested in how these concepts operate in the present and how they developed and transformed historically. Submissions should recognize that no state is a monolith, and that we often cannot understand states to act in a neat, unilateral, top-down manner. Exploring different dynamics of power and the relationship between various aspects of states, public rights, and identities may also reveal inflection points, helping us to make sense of the past and of our own turbulent times.
We will not place spatial or temporal limits on article solicitations. Possible topics for entries include, but are not limited to:
• Law, (im)migration, borders & territory
• The legal construction of sovereignty over time
• Law & political economy perspectives on the state and/or sovereignty
• Law & racial capitalism
• Legal mobilization and the challenges of inclusion
• International law and national regulatory autonomy & democracy
• Human and/or socioeconomic rights at the national/supranational level
• New constitutionalism and global governance
• The transnationalization of the legal profession and the global rule of law
• Changing forms of legal consciousness
• Legal pluralism in a post-globalized world
• Movement politics, legal institutions, and transcommunal solidarity networks
• Precarious citizenship, the nation-state, and crisis
If you have any questions about our inaugural theme, please email mjls.execs@umich.edu.
