As we move towards a more global legal community, often with accompanying injustice and violence, Mireille Delmas-Marty demonstrates an urgent need to reconstruct the national and international legal landscapes. She argues that legal reasoning can be applied to concepts such as human rights for European citizens in the new world order. The book will be of interest to all comparative European lawyers, and to social scientists and legal theorists grappling with contemporary issues in legal pluralism and globalization.

As we move towards a more global legal community, often with accompanying injustice and violence, Mireille Delmas-Marty demonstrates that there is an urgent need to reconstruct the national and international legal landscapes. Legal reasoning can be applied to concepts such as human rights for European citizens in the new world order. In this book the author argues for a rule of law that is common in every sense of the word: accessible to all rather than reserved exclusively for officials, common to the various legal sectors despite increasing specialization, and common to diverse States. The book will be of interest to all comparative European lawyers, and to social scientists and legal theorists grappling with contemporary issues in legal pluralism and globalization.

From the viewpoint of the constitutional crisis in Europe, slow UN reforms, difficulties implementing the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court, and tensions between human rights and trade, Mireille Delmas-Marty's 'journey through the legal landscape' of the early years of the 21st century shows it to be dominated by imprecision, uncertainty and instability. The early 21st century appears to be the era of great disorder: in the silence of the market and the fracas of arms, a world overly fragmented by anarchical globalisation is being unified too quickly through hegemonic integration. How, she asks, can we move beyond the relative and the universal to build order without imposing it, to accept pluralism without giving up on a common law? Neither utopian fusion nor illusory autonomy, Ordering Pluralism is her answer: both an epistemological revolution and an art, it means creating a common legal area by progressive adjustments that preserve diversity. Since an immutable world order is impossible, the imaginative forces of law must be called upon to invent a flexible process of harmonisation that leaves room for believing we can agree on - and protect - common values. 'The book is timely and relevant to the practical concerns of those who work with, and within, the legal system. We must thank Professor Delmas-Marty for her fine work.' From the foreword, Stephen Breyer, Washington, DC