When societal constitutionalism encounters private international law: Of pluralism, distribution, and ‘chronotopes’

Abstract

If societal constitutions can be defined as forms of self-constituting power beyond the confines of classical forms of authority and legal constraint in a post-national or global world, then private international law can make several offerings to transnational regime theory, on the condition, however, of understanding the discipline, beyond its technical component, as a receptacle for ideas about the place of the foreign within the host legal system. Indeed, its encounter with societal constitutionalism serves to bring to the surface some of its less familiar, or less theorized, dimensions. The mode of the relation-ship between the two disciplines can therefore be seen as one of mutually constitutive co-production. Thus, private international law offers a methodological template for transnational constitutional pluralism, puts into practice fundamental requirements of democracy beyond the state, and suggests ways of understanding the complex sequences of time/space that are implicated in the interactions between transnational regimes.