Globalisation and Legal Scholarship: William Twining's Call for Revolutionary Jurisprudence

Abstract

This paper argues that William Twining, in Globalisation and Legal Scholarship, is calling for the adoption of a revolution-producing/enabling process and a revolution-ready mindset by legal scholars. The identified process and mindset results from taking a global perspective, which includes looking across time, disciplines, cultures and legal structures so as to challenge the underlying and unquestioned assumptions of our legal theories. The paper employs the works of two other authors, Thomas Samuel Kuhn and Doris Lessing, to expand on Twining’s process and identify the deep purpose for the adoption of the proposed process. The paper ends by applying this Twiningian process to income taxation in order to challenge the currently accepted/assumed purpose of income taxation and to develop an alternate purpose (and explore the implications of this alternate purpose) for income taxation.

Keywords: William Twining, Legal Theory, Globalisation, Legal Scholarship, Legal Education, Transnational Law, International Taxation, Legal Scholarhip, Globalisation, Legal Presumptions and Assumptions