Legal Traditions and the New Logics

Over the last three centuries western legal thinking has been driven by notions of nation-states, national legal systems and classical forms of logic. The emphasis has been on consistency and uniformity within states and relations of conflict between states (‘the conflict of laws’). Globalisation and the mobility of human populations have, however, changed the background within which legal thinking now takes place. There is increasing human diversity within states and increasing interdependence between states. The notion of legal tradition would thus have become appropriate as a more inclusive way of thinking about law, and the new ‘paraconsistent’ logics appear to provide the intellectual means for conciliation of legal difference. The project will attempt to justify these hypotheses.