Massachusetts School of Law

How do private law institutions of developing countries differ from those of developed countries? A common view is that the legal systems of the Global South are often outdated, failed transplants of Global North models, or plagued by enforcement challenges. This book project offers a different perspective by focusing on legal innovation and adaptation in the Global South. We examine how countries in the Global South have embraced legal doctrines and solutions that deviate from approaches that currently hold the status of orthodoxy in richer countries, and pursue distinct and potentially broader public policy objectives or reflect different values, in response to conditions that are commonplace in developing countries. Our analysis points to reasons why the legacy of colonialism, limited fiscal capacity, economic dependence on richer countries, and macro-economic volatility may encourage lawmakers in poor countries to develop heterodox doctrines. We explore different manifestations of legal heterodoxy across various areas of private law in a range of countries in the Global South. Recognizing legal heterodoxies in the Global South enlarges our understanding of legal experiences and possibilities, and contributes to our understanding about the driving forces and direction of legal evolution around the world.

This highly rewarding book stands at an obvious distance from the topics that typically comprise the history of work and labour relations.For the attentive reader, however, it will illuminate otherwise easily missed paths by which legal-institutional and intellectual history intersect with the more marked social, cultural, and political currents that have formed the context for the making and remaking of global labour history.Even for the more casual if still critical reader, the distance should be traversed easily enough given the recognizable genre of insight its author works within: of untangling the strands of modernity's myth making, especially around the development of its own supposedly key attributes, through demonstrating the obscured or, as Govind puts it, "mask[ed]" (p.327), particularities of colonial encounter through which they emerged.Here, it is the untangling of Western juridico-political modernity's narrative around the rise of parliamentary sovereignty (with its allied notions of jurisdiction and propertied subjecthood) and the particularities of British colonialism's pre-twentieth-century encounter with the South Asian subcontinent that are at hand.For those familiar with the historiography of Western legal and political thought, Govind's focus will be at least partly predictable from his title, a clever nod to German historian Ernst Kantorowicz's canonical 1957 work, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology.Of course, Kantorowicz's own title is not merely a rhetorical flourish, but refers to a doctrine developed by centralizing monarchs in medieval Europe: the idea that the king possessed not only a mortal, physical body, but also an immortal one unbound by time.It was through this immortal body that the king exercised a sovereignty that was not simply personal but preternatural, persisting through each successive occupant of the throne.Systematic, yet plainly out of keeping with the theory-cum-liberal hagiography of representative democracy, this understanding of sovereignty, Govind contends, did not just disappear with the protracted advent of representative parliamentary bodies and the expansion of commercial society.As he puts it in the book's conclusion, this study of empire is an investigation of justice and jurisdiction, its stage as much as its masking.In this narrative, an economic history of trade is exposed as a determined militarized-legal practice of war and subjugation, which several historians have seen as an age of sociable commerce and roaring liberty keeping at bay a 'night watchman state.' In contrast, this work has described the political ecology in terms of a fierce maritime regulation ineluctably leading to military domination, from Prize laws to monopolization and military conquest (p.327).

Health Law as Private Law delves into the complex relationship between private law and health care. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of public ordering and state-created rules was evident, yet this work reveals the equally important role of private agreements in shaping health care policy. The volume's five sections – theory and structure, reproductive care, costs and financing, innovation and institutions, contracts and torts – include innovative conceptualizations and approaches to applying private law to health law. Chapters authored by leading experts explore how private law can be utilized to address significant health care and public health problems, and to achieve much-needed health care reform. Comprehensive and timely, Health Law as Private Law opens new pathways that will influence future policy, jurisprudence, and regulation. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.