http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/gplh6http://www.epubli.de/shop/buch/53894"The spatiotemporal conjunction is a fundamental aspect of the juridical reflection on the historicity of law. Despite the fact that it seems to represent an issue directly connected with the question of where legal history is heading today, it still has not been the object of a focused inquiry. Against this background, the book’s proposal consists in rethinking key confluences related to this problem in order to provide coordinates for a collective understanding and dialogue. The aim of this volume, however, is not to offer abstract methodological considerations, but rather to rely both on concrete studies, out of which a reflection on this conjunction emerges, as well as on the reconstruction of certain research lines featuring a spatiotemporal component. This analytical approach makes a contribution by providing some suggestions for the employment of space and time as coordinates for legal history. Indeed, contrary to those historiographical attitudes reflecting a monistic conception of space and time (as well as a Eurocentric approach), the book emphasises the need for a delocalized global perspective. In general terms, the essays collected in this book intend to take into account the multiplicity of the spatiotemporal confines, the flexibility of those instruments that serve to create chronologies and scenarios, as well as certain processes of adaptation of law to different times and into different spaces. The spatiotemporal dynamism enables historians not only to detect new perspectives and dimensions in foregone themes, but also to achieve new and compelling interpretations of legal history. As far as the relationship between space and law is concerned, the book analyses experiences in which space operates as a determining factor of law, e.g. in terms of a field of action for law. Moreover, it outlines the attempted scales of spatiality in order to develop legal historical research. With reference to the connection between time and law, the volume sketches the possibility of considering the factor of time, not just as a descriptive tool, but as an ascriptive moment (quasi an inner feature) of a legal problem, thus making it possible to appreciate the synchronic aspects of the ‘juridical experience’. As a whole, the volume aims to present spatiotemporality as a challenge for legal history. Indeed, reassessing the value of the spatiotemporal coordinates for legal history implies thinking through both the thematic and methodological boundaries of the discipline."

Papers from the international seminar Ambiti geografici e dimensioni temporali nella storia del diritto: esperienze e percorsi di ricerca, held at the Scuola Superiore Giacomo Leopardi, Università di Macerata, on 20th and 21st June 2013.

An historically wide-ranging new approach to the study of foreign policy.

When the margin IS the center, perspectives shift

This book examines how race, ethnicity, and religious difference affected the concession of citizenship in the Spanish Empire's territories.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. This book examines three expeditions by the Spanish to the borders of Charcas, a district that covers present-day Bolivia and the northwest of Argentina, in the second half of the sixteenth century, using an approach that has not been attempted until now. Scholarship on these events has framed them as part of a gradual top-down process of centralisation driven by the Crown to extend its power and build a colonial ‘state’ in the Americas. This book challenges that view, approaching the expeditions through an analysis of the political culture that underpinned them. It explores the events within the process of installation and consolidation of royal jurisdiction, understood here as the authority to establish law and deliver justice, in a remote area. This was a process achieved through coercion and violence, as well as negotiation and consensus, that involved both the Spanish and indigenous peoples, and that frequently created overlapping jurisdictions, via downscaling of politics and dispersal of power. Jurisdictional politics were decided and settled in battlefields and courts and involved the theatricalization of power, to make a distant monarch present, which, paradoxically, made such absence the more evident. The book is an invitation to re-dimension the scope of Spain’s empire

This book develops a new framework for analyzing the spatio-temporal workings of law and other forms of governance. Chronotopes of Law argues that studies of law and governance can be reinvigorated by drawing on a bundle of quite heterogenous analytical tools that do not have a single provenance or a single political or normative aim but that work well in combination. Analyses of legal temporality carried out by anthropologists and studies of law and space undertaken by geographers and legal scholars have proliferated in recent years, but these research traditions have remained largely separate. By adapting notions such as intertextuality, dialogism, and the ‘chronotope’ from Mikhail Bakhtin, notions designed specifically to synthesize considerations of space and time in a framework that is open-ended, interactive and dynamic, Mariana Valverde develops an anti-metaphysical theory and method for legal studies. This approach will be useful both to theorists and to researchers seeking to illuminate the actual workings of law and other forms of governance. Indeed, a key aim of the book is to break down the institutional and disciplinary barriers that prevent theorists from learning from empirical studies and viceversa. Written by one of the foremost sociolegal scholars writing today, this theoretically innovative work constitutes a major contribution to contemporary studies in law and society.