This book is a critical assessment of the status of private international law within the broader firmament of international law by one of the field’s leading commentators.

This important book offers an ambitious and interdisciplinary vision of how private international law (or the conflict of laws) might serve as a heuristic for re-working our general understandings of legality in directions that respond to ever-deepening global ecological crises. Unusual in legal scholarship, the author borrows (in bricolage mode) from the work of Bruno Latour, alongside indigenous cosmologies, extinction theories and Levinassian phenomenology, to demonstrate why this field's specific frontier location at the outpost of the law – where it is viewed from the outside as obscure and from the inside as a self-contained normative world – generates its potential power to transform law generally and globally.

Combining pragmatic and pluralist theory with an excavation of ‘shadow’ ecological dimensions of law, the author, a recognised authority within the field as conventionally understood, offers a truly global view. Put simply, it is a generational magnum opus. All international and transnational lawyers, be they in the private or public field, should read this book.

"Horatia Muir Watt’s exquisitely researched and documented book is a tour de force." - Revue critique de droit International Privé (RCDIP)

"Lyrical and erudite ... This is courageous, committed work—a unique contribution in the best of the critical tradition." - Pierre Schlag, University Distinguished Professor and Byron R White Professor of Law, University of Colorado (Boulder)

"[An] innovative and surprising work … The book stands out as a rare example of a truly transdisciplinary attempt at relocating law within the human sciences. This book challenges one’s understanding of private international law, and is an invitation to rethink the purpose of our involvement in its practise or scholarship." - Conflict of Laws