Toward a New Legal Common Sense

This chapter analyses the contribution of Toward a New Legal Common Sense: Law, Globalization, and Emancipation (New Legal Common Sense), authored by Emeritus Professor of Sociology Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Santos is based in Portugal but spends part of the year in the United States as a distinguished legal scholar at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. One of Santos’s principal contentions in this work is that the hegemony of the law of the Global North blocks from view the experiences of colonised and marginalised people/s around the world and thus obscures their own frames of emancipation. Santos has updated the work for the second and third editions. In the third edition, Santos himself differentiates his work from that of critical legal studies (‘CLS’), notably Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and postmodernist views, such as those of Duncan Kennedy. Akin to the CLS movement, New Legal Common Sense takes to task the institutional and ideological order that is expressed in law.

© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Daniel Newman; this chapter Kathrine Galloway.