ABSTRACT
Mobile, by definition, is having freedom of movement, implying ease of transfer from one locality to another. But a second meaning is changing quickly in expression (as in a mobile face). When speaking of mobile law, the first definition would appear the most useful, raising questions of both the mechanisms and the impacts of the transfer of normative concepts from one place to another. But the second meaning may also help in developing a critical stance towards legal borrowing, legal engineering, and the complex evidence from local, state and international fields. It might help to explain, for example, how despite the best intentions of legal innovators, the same normative concept may find quite separate expression in different localities, generating outcomes quite different from those expected. These outcomes, in turn, might be conceptually linked to the mechanisms of transfer and to local struggles over the shape of the law. This paper describes how one epistemic community (Haas, 1992) promoted the global spread of a fishery management strategy based on privatized access to fish stocks, as part of a larger neoliberal economic agenda promoting market-driven solutions to diverse social issues (Wiber, 2000), and how this strategy subsequently found acceptance among a wide network of bureaucrats of different nation states. It also documents how fishers in the Scotia Fundy region of Canada struggled to control the impact of such privatization policy when it was unilaterally imposed on their fishery. In doing so, the paper explores some of the reasons why alternative epistemic communities did not get the same reception from bureaucrats, as well as why the state policy did not have quite the impact anticipated. In examining this case material, the paper also addresses the methodological question of how legal scholarship can contribute to our
understanding of global forces and their impact on local places (Merry, 1992, 2000).
