The Unsteady State
General Jurisprudence for Dynamic Social Phenomena

The first work of analytical legal theory exploring law's relations to environment, security, and technology as preconditions of legal order.

Keith Culver (Author), Michael Giudice (Author)

9781107134805, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 March 2017

250 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.51 kg

Analytical jurisprudence often proceeds with two key assumptions: that all law is either contained in or traceable back to an authorizing law-state, and that states are stable and in full control of the borders of their legal systems. What would a general theory of law be like and do if these long-standing presumptions were loosened? The Unsteady State aims to assess the possibilities by enacting a relational approach to explanation of law, exploring law's relations to the environment, security, and technology. The account provided here offers a rich and renewed perspective on the preconditions and continuity of legal order in systemic and non-systemic forms, and further supports the view that the state remains prominent yet is now less dominant in the normative lives of norm-subjects and as an object of legal theory.

Introduction
Part I. Preparing Analytical Theory for New Challenges: 1. Pulling off the mask of law: a renewed research agenda for analytical legal theory
2. Making old questions new: legality, legal system, and state
3. Legal systems and presumptions of unity and validity
4. The elements of legal order
Part II. Law, Environment, Security, and Technology: 5. Globalization, the predictions of legality, and law's relation to environment
6. Legality, security, and Leviathan's ghost
7. Information communication technologies and legal theory
8. Beyond the unsteady state.

Subject Areas: Systems of law [LAF], Jurisprudence & philosophy of law [LAB], Central government [JPQ]