Transnational Legal Methodology and Domestic Markets for Food

Abstract

Transnational legal scholars often describe how today transnational private ordering may evade, even weaken, state power. This article, by contrast, explores how transnational private ordering and state power can function as complements as much as antagonists. More specifically, it analyses an ongoing legal conflict in India over the regulation of new large supermarket chains according to what Peer Zumbansen calls transnational legal methodology — that is, a method of legal analysis that theorizes the transnational and domestic, like the state and the market, not as opposites but rather as alternative, even potentially homologous, ways of describing the distribution of authority, resources, and power. In so doing, the article also suggests that food — a global market commodity constitutive of national sovereignty — is especially good to think with for transnational legal theory.

Keywords: Transnational Legal Methodology; Food; Supermarkets; India