The Ties That Bind

This collection explores the relevance of the law to conceptualizing, creating and sustaining ‘the ties that bind’ us together. Law relies on and reflects and reinforces certain types of social cohesion. It can also facilitate, or hinder, the development of certain types of social bonding. The law works in many ways, whether through articulating the terms of common life, or designing institutions to promote or safeguard solidarity, or through providing symbolic support for particular totems of social order. Exploring the various levels and facets of this relationship, the collection develops an area of applied legal and political theory that is today important and urgent, yet still somewhat under-researched The first part of the collection is concerned with a broad exploration of the basic idea of bindingness in legal and political communities, and with different aspects of the general relation between social cohesion on the one hand and other key ‘ordering’ concepts on the other – in particular, law, justice, and democracy. A second group of contributions are more institutionally grounded. They are concerned primarily with how both national constitutional processes and constitutional law and transnational and international legal forms might shape and be shaped by a sense of social cohesion.