The Relationship Between Global Law and the Individual: Symbiosis, Oscillation, and Strategic Subjectification

This Article analyzes the relationship between the individual and global law adopting as a point of entry the concept of jurisgenesis, understood as the process of creating legal meaning. The Article explores this relationship through three patterns: symbiosis, oscillation, and strategic subjectification. After an overview of the notion of global law, the Article first examines symbiosis, showing that the notion of “individual,” as it emerged in legal modernity, constitutes a necessary infrastructure of global law. In parallel, global law opens possibilities to the individual that would otherwise be out of reach under conditions of globalization. Second, the Article examines oscillation, describing how global law triggers a dynamic of expansion and restriction of the individual’s legal relevance. This dynamic, in turn, propels a further abstraction of the notion of individual and makes the interplay between social individualization, legal personification, and specific legal entitlements more visible. Third, the Article examines how global law helps imagine strategies of legal subjectification, some of which may be used to counter problematic features of sociolegal globalization. It then highlights three relevant strategies: elaboration of new legal concepts and regimes, selective consolidation of certain collective actors’ legal position, and attribution of legal relevance to claims based on so-called “counter-rights.”