Law and Societies in Global Contexts: Contemporary Approaches. By Eve Darian-Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 428 pp. $36.99 paperback.

Law and Societies in Global Contexts: Contemporary Approaches.By Eve Darian-Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 428 pp. $36.99 paperback.Eve Darian-Smith's core message is straightforward and urgent: the issues that matter unfold on a scale that is global, yet we live life on a scale that is local, and continue to think and teach sociolegal studies on a scale that is national. If law is to find meaningful ways to address pressing concerns such as food security, people smug- gling, climate change, and terrorism, then sociolegal scholarship must adopt a global perspective: a perspective that "destabilizes our modern and linear understanding of what law is, where law appears, and how law works . . . recognizing that domestic law as it plays out within states is, and always has been, constitutively linked to issues of global economic, political, and cultural power" (378). The complexities, dynamism, and pluralism of a global sociolegal perspective becomes the axis around which this book simultane- ously builds on the sociolegal tradition of interrogating the hegemonic while repairing the analytic inadequacy of state-centric law.Importantly, the book maps a way forward by first reviewing and assessing sociolegal studies in terms of its histories, politics, contexts, and content. This is no mean feat given the breadth of the field, and the abundance of the literature embraced by its interdisciplinarity. As part of this review, Darian-Smith highlights the provincialism of conventional introductory sociolegal texts in the United States: "They typically present U.S. law as if it is the only legal system operating in the world, and, moreover, one that does so in a geopolitical silo" (5). Dismantling sociolegal pro- vincialism is one of the many significant contributions of this book.Just as Laws and Societies in Global Contexts moves away from state-centric law to illuminate sites of legalities below and above the level of the state, the book abandons "predictable topics such as social control, lawmaking, legal administration, courts and juries, dispute resolution, capital punishment, crime, the legal profession" (5) in favor of themes and topics that enable fresh ways of seeing. These are: the production of legal knowledge (Chapter Three), reimagining legal geographies (Chapter Four), securing peoples (Chapter Five), and re-racializing the world (Chapter Six). The topics of these chapters are framed by an early insistence that analysis with a global sociolegal perspective should be foregrounded by attention to "two persistent and interlocking themes" (39) that together "provide the ultimate challenge for long-term peace and human security in the twenty-first century" (39). These are, first, law as "a dynamic artifact of cultural engagement" (39), and second, "assemblages . . . of overlapping legal systems that embody a diverse range of cultural values, norms, and meanings" (39). Among the ways in which Darian- Smith engages the tensions and complexities of these two themes is a consideration of legal pluralism, illustrated with examples of popular, political, and legal institutional responses to Shari'a law, and the laws of indigenous peoples, in the industrialized "West. …