Cosmopolitan Law in the Postmodern World

The paper examines the desirability of cosmopolitan law and consequent cosmopolitan legal studies and enquiries in our largely postmodern world. The exposition, therefore, operates against a world environment which otherwise points to a rather disorderly state of affairs despite the unifying forces of economic globalisation. Accordingly, the modern legal, political and economic arena often presents us with parallel worlds of order and disorder but the fragility of the orderly element is readily apparent in numerous postmodern and non-postmodern narratives. This state of affairs has implications for law too, despite the overall stability, traditionality and conservative character of the subject. Law, as we know it, otherwise offspring of modernity and reason, struggles to maintain its systemacity in this new world of old-new narratives, a world which is postmodern as a whole. The author wishes to address the epistemic issues of this great incompatibility between modernist established legal doctrine and postmodern legal narratives by positing that the two opposing worlds can be better appreciated (if not bridged) by the appreciation of the different, the diverse and the disorderly through a new cosmopolitan legal ethos which legal educators — at the very least — ought to inspire to their student bodies around the world and, by extension, to what we have come to generically call world society as a whole.