301150 The Law and its Localisation: Rights, Actors and Processes under Focus (MA: Rechts- und Regulierungssoziologie) (S) (SoSe 2024)

The course engages with questions of application or implementation of the law at grass-roots level; importantly, it touches upon questions of appropriation, localisation or vernacularisation, that is, the form the law takes when applied in (local) contexts. Socio-political realities thereby become part and parcel of the analysis, and with it, actors and rights holders. In other words, we shall focus on how does the law materialises, how a multiplicity of actors takes a shaping part when the law is being operationalised. This also opens the floor for questions on legal pluralism, the dynamics between predominant and other parallel legal orders, ultimately also legal hierarchies. In more abstract ways, we attempt to get a sense of top-down and bottom-up processes as these concern actors involved in the construction and deconstruction of the law, but also in relation to translation processes. Indeed, the focus is also placed on actors involved in all the phases of implementation, that is, civil society organisations, local stakeholders, rights holders or State entities at different levels, with different interests and varying degrees of leverage involved. This also makes us uncover the complexities of relations between rights holders and duty bearers, of rights as legal constructs, or other social processes accompanying and underlying implementation matters. Our analytical scope shall not be limited to a sole legal sphere only, but encompass domestic, regional and international legal frameworks as well as dynamics developing between and within legal orders.