ABSTRACT
Legal historians would be quick to point out that law long predated the configurations of modernity. The linkage of law, tradition, information, and crimes of corruption, according to Glenn, can be found in many of the world’s legal traditions. For many radical legal thinkers, the collapse of practical reason and, more generally, of the project of Enlightenment, is often the starting point of their reflection on modernity. The consideration within critical legal studies to refuse an unreflective ideal of Western legal modernity has a dual significance. Legal anthropologist Rosemary Coombe comments on Balakrishnan Rajagopal’s critique: Protesting international law’s promotion of human rights as the only appropriate route to emancipation and social justice. He shows how international human rights law has repeatedly developed so as to contain resistance movements and challenges to Western hegemony while enabling and extending new forms of governance over Third World masses envisioned through colonial tropes of fear and loathing.
