Kent Law School lecturer Dr Luis Eslava has been awarded the Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize and the Prize for Early Career Academics for his book Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development.
It is the fourth time that the Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize has been won by an academic from the School. Both prizes are awarded by the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) in recognition of outstanding socio-legal scholarship.
Local Space, Global Life engages with the expansive, ground-level, and intertwined operation of international law and the development project by discussing the current international attention to local jurisdictions. Over the last three decades, and through the discourse of decentralization, municipalities and cities in the Third World have become the preferred spaces to promote global ideals of human, economic and environmental development. Through an ethnographic study of Bogotá’s recent development experience and the city’s changing relation to its illegal neighbourhoods, Dr Eslava interrogates in this book the rationale and exposes the contradictions involved in this international turn to the local. Dr Eslava said: ‘The end result of the book, I hope, is a thorough examination of both the current functioning of the global order and the nature of international law.’
According to Professor John Comaroff, Professor of African and African-American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University, Local Space, Global Life offers a “profound reflection of the role of law in the history of the present.” He praised it as a “must-read for anyone, whatever their discipline or their ideological convictions, concerned with law and society in the contemporary moment.”
Dr Eslava said: ‘I am extremely thankful to all the people that open their offices, neighbourhoods and lives in Bogotá to let me understand a little bit better the workings of the international legal order, and also to all my colleagues and institutions in different parts of the world that made the book possible. In particular, I am grateful to my colleagues and students at Kent Law School, who offer me on, a daily basis, a vibrant and critically committed environment in which to teach what I have learnt in making this book.’
In a recent interview with publisher Cambridge University Press, available to view on YouTube, Dr Eslava says that, through his research for the book, he has tried to generate a richer understanding of international law and to offer a new image of international law than is ethnographically grounded, anthropologically informed, theoretically aware, and historically cognisant of the evolution of the international legal order.
The initial research for this book was awarded the Harold Luntz Graduate Research Thesis Prize in 2013 by Melbourne Law School and the Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in a PhD Thesis by The University of Melbourne. The book has also been nominated for the Law and Society Association’s Herbert Jacob Book Prize.
For those who want to hear more about the book, Kent’s Centre for Critical International Law (CeCIL) is hosting a book launch on the Canterbury campus on Wednesday 16 March. Dr Eslava will discuss his book in conversation with Professor Gerry Simpson from the London School of Economics in Library A108 and the Templeman Library Gallery at 6pm (all welcome!) There will also be an author-meets-readers session at the SLSA conference on Tuesday 5 April.
Dr Eslava, a Lecturer in International Law, teaches undergraduate and postgraduate students at Kent Law School. He is also a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School, and an International Professor at Universidad Externado de Colombia. He is also Faculty at the Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy. He teaches and writes in the areas of International Law, International Legal Theory and History, Anthropology of International Law, Public Law, Law and Development, and Urban Law and Politics. His research focuses on the relationship between international and domestic legal orders, and the effects of this relationship both on our jurisprudential understanding of these areas of law, and on the constitution of everyday life in today’s global order.
Previous recipients from Kent Law School of the Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize include: Senior Lecturer Dr Emilie Cloatre for her book Pills for the Poorest: An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave Macmillan) in 2014; Senior Lecturer Dr Nicola Barker, for her book Not the Marrying Kind: A Feminist Critique of Same-Sex Marriage (Palgrave Macmillan) in 2013; and Professor Didi Herman for her book An Unfortunate Coincidence: Jews, Jewishness, and English Law (Oxford University Press) in 2012.