{"id":1465,"date":"2016-03-11T16:13:25","date_gmt":"2016-03-11T16:13:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/law-news\/?p=1465"},"modified":"2016-03-11T16:13:25","modified_gmt":"2016-03-11T16:13:25","slug":"local-space-global-life-two-slsa-book-prizes-for-dr-luis-eslava","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/law-news\/local-space-global-life-two-slsa-book-prizes-for-dr-luis-eslava\/","title":{"rendered":"Local Space, Global Life: two SLSA book prizes for Dr Luis Eslava"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kent Law School lecturer Dr Luis Eslava has been awarded the Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize and the\u00a0Prize for Early\u00a0Career Academics for his book\u00a0Local Space, Global Life:\u00a0The Everyday Operation\u00a0of International Law and Development<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

It is the fourth time that the Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize has been won by an academic from the School.\u00a0Both prizes are awarded by the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) in recognition of outstanding socio-legal scholarship.<\/p>\n

Local Space, Global Life<\/em> 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 Bogot\u00e1\u2019s recent development experience and the city\u2019s 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\u00a0said: ‘The end result\u00a0of the book, I hope, is a thorough examination of both the current functioning of the global order and the nature of international law.’<\/p>\n

According to\u00a0Professor John Comaroff<\/a>, Professor of African and African-American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University,\u00a0Local Space, Global Life<\/em>\u00a0offers a “profound reflection of the role of law in the history of the present.” He\u00a0praised it as a “must-read for anyone, whatever their discipline or their ideological convictions, concerned with law and society in the contemporary moment.”<\/p>\n

Dr Eslava said: \u2018I am extremely thankful to all the people that open their offices, neighbourhoods and lives in Bogot\u00e1 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\u00a0my colleagues and students at Kent Law School, who offer me on, a daily basis, a vibrant and critically committed environment\u00a0in which to\u00a0teach what I have learnt in making this book.\u2019<\/p>\n

In a recent interview with publisher Cambridge University Press, available to view on YouTube<\/a>, Dr Eslava says that, through his research for the book, he has tried to generate a richer\u00a0understanding 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.<\/p>\n

The initial research for this book was awarded\u00a0the\u00a0Harold Luntz Graduate Research Thesis Prize in 2013 by Melbourne Law School and the Chancellor\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For those who want to hear more about the book, Kent’s Centre for Critical International Law<\/a> (CeCIL) is hosting a book launch<\/a> on the Canterbury campus on Wednesday 16 March. Dr Eslava will discuss his book in conversation with Professor Gerry Simpson<\/a> 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<\/a> on Tuesday 5 April.<\/p>\n

Dr Eslava<\/a>, 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\u2019s 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<\/a> 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\u2019s global order.<\/p>\n

Previous recipients from Kent Law School of the Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize include: Senior Lecturer Dr Emilie Cloatre for her book\u00a0Pills for the Poorest: An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa<\/a><\/em> (Palgrave Macmillan) in 2014; Senior Lecturer Dr Nicola Barker, for her book\u00a0Not the Marrying Kind: A Feminist Critique of Same-Sex Marriage<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(Palgrave Macmillan) in 2013; and Professor Didi Herman for her book\u00a0An Unfortunate Coincidence: Jews, Jewishness, and English Law<\/a><\/em>\u00a0 (Oxford University Press) in 2012.<\/p>\n