• • CHARTING THE UNEVEN DOMESTIC APPLICATION OF LAW IN THE GLOBAL CITY “A municipal government that was determined to protect the interests of its own citizens would need a kind of world reach and freedom of action that is clearly inconsistent with state sovereignty.”

• • — Warren Magnusson, The Search for Political Space¹

1. Introduction:

In the last two decades, cities have received a wealth of scholarly attention. Geographers,² urban planners,³ sociologists,⁴ philosophers,⁵ economists,⁶ and political scientists⁷ have viewed subjects such as economic competition,⁸ citizenship,⁹ social cohesion¹⁰ and regulation and governance¹¹ through the lens of cities’ lived and built environments. Many contemporary scholars view the urban as a key site for the negotiation, propagation, and contestation of various globalized phenomena.¹² Stressing the unique sociological importance of urbanization they have situated cities as central protagonists within a broader globalized narrative:

The city has long been a strategic site for the exploration of many major subjects confronting society and sociology. But it has not always been a heuristic space – a space capable of producing knowledge about some of the major transformations of an epoch.¹³

Adopting an ambitious scope and varied focus, urban scholarship has analyzed some of the central theoretical issues posed by globalization, such as the mutually constitutive relationship between the local and the global¹⁴ and the disaggregation of national economic, political and social space.¹⁵ Gaining insight and inspiration from cities – the social and physical formations within which the majority of the world resides¹⁶ – about far-reaching contemporary transformations,¹⁷ scholars have begun tracing cities’ role in the production of global culture and, with even more vigor, the role they play in maintaining and servicing transnational economic networks. As Sassen memorably states, global cities “are the places where the work of globalization gets done.”¹⁸

Perhaps unsurprisingly, legal scholars have not analyzed cities extensively. Municipal law is, in some respects, an impoverished province. Cities lack constitutional status in North America and, in general, derive their power solely through the will of states and provinces.¹⁹ Besides the work of Gerald Frug²⁰ and Yishai Blank,²¹ who have explored the role of urban governance in a transnational context and with regard to international legal orders, most municipal legal scholarship remains squarely within the bounds of its subject’s circumscribed reach, focusing on issues such as planning law, for example, or the limitations of local legal authority.

While topics such as these are important areas of study, particularly if one seeks to understand the historical development and contemporary legal powers of municipal corporations,²² analyzing cities through a doctrinally restricted perspective (i.e. only with regard to land use law or other traditionally municipal functions) or with too much regard for their jurisdictional constraints (i.e. only discussing their lack of constitutional status) speaks little to law’s extensive role in the social production of urban space,²³ nor to its daily effect on urban residents or, in some cases, its ability to mediate urban problems and conflicts.²⁴ Such analyses are also unable to adequately situate globalizing cities²⁵ as catalysts in the ongoing transformation of domestic law under globalization, nor recognize that contemporary cities are in part the products of laws and regulations which emanate from multiple scales, whether local, state, national, transnational or international.²⁶

This paper outlines a theoretical framework for inserting law into ongoing discussions about the emergence and character of so-called ‘global cities.’²⁷ In doing so, it seeks to address assumptions and omissions in existing scholarship on urban globalization. In general, this scholarship understands cities as either economic or cultural agglomerations, or some combination of each. It has not addressed the pervasive role played by law in structuring urban economic and cultural interactions.

This paper also poses challenges to generally accepted categories of legal thought and methodology. Primarily, it explores the way in which orthodox understandings of jurisdiction have impeded the development of an urban legal scholarship on par with writing about urban globalization in other disciplines. In short, entrenched legal hierarchies have compelled city-interested legal scholars to limit their analyses of cities to primarily municipal legal frameworks, thus preventing them from fully recognizing and addressing inter-scalar dynamics from a legal perspective.²⁸

In addition, the paper reiterates the argument that blindly assuming and accepting the zero-sum distribution of legal competence within jurisdictional hierarchies exacerbates challenges faced by contemporary global cities.²⁹ Together, these analyses suggest that benefits can be gained from conceptually unmooring law from both doctrinal categories and territorial boundaries with regard to research on cities and law. Cities are pluralistic spaces; legal systems are generally pluralistic as well.³⁰ Understanding that law’s relevance derives from both from its point of inception (i.e. emanating from a particular jurisdiction, through the behest of a specific authority) and its point of execution (i.e. the societal formations in which it gains meaning) allows more of law’s involvement in urban life and space to be taken into consideration, not only those legal instruments which are coded as municipal. It also allows for more creative legal thinking about ‘urban governance,’ recognizing that this concept encompasses a wide-range of policies and encouraging a more cooperative (in an intergovernmental sense) approach to urban regulation and governance that engages authorities at different scales.

Finally, this discussion is framed within a socio-legal outlook which contends that the growing complexity and diversity of major Western cities and their ongoing transition into a knowledge-based economic paradigm increasingly represents the localization of globalized phenomena within the state³¹ and encourages the reorganization of domestic legal systems. Basically, the paper engages in a twofold exploration, seeking to understand how legal analyses can address the social complexity of globalized cities at the same time as analyzing law’s role in constituting this very complexity.

These issues are addressed both theoretically and through concrete examples. Through an analysis of the breach between the concepts of ‘scale’ and ‘jurisdiction’³² the relevance of jurisdictional boundaries and character of inter-jurisdictional relationships will be reexamined with a view to better organizing political and legal power in the global era. Using two case studies from the city of Toronto, the recent reform of municipal legislation and the underemployment of immigrant professionals as it relates to federal immigration law, this paper will demonstrate that law is deeply implicated in the outcome of urban futures and that cities can and should benefit from a more sophisticated understanding of its pervasive role.

1. Mapping Law & Globalization:

A. Transnational Legal Theory

To date, the most fruitful analyses of the relationship between law and globalization have addressed law’s transnationalization.³³ Supplanting the domestic/international binary with more sophisticated accounts of legal interactions between state and non-state, public and private actors based around legal boundary-crossing,³⁴ transnational legal theory has complicated traditional accounts of jurisdiction³⁵ basing its assessments on increased economic interdependence, harmonization and complexity or the global migration of normative orders such as international human rights law.

While one of transnational legal theory’s primary concerns is conflict between different legal orders and scales, it also addresses the emergence of new constellations of legal ordering and new bodies of law. In particular, lawyers analyzing the relationship between law, the contemporary state and globalization have increasingly identified law’s ‘fragmentation,’ ³⁶ a development characterized by the rise or private rulemaking³⁷ and the emergence of specialized legal subsystems designed to accommodate complex economic fields and other semi-autonomous regimes.³⁸ Generally, these accounts portray a world overrun with mobile capital and corporations able to evade onerous regulation, self-regulating without fear of rigorous oversight or censure. Law’s role becomes facilitative and indirect.³⁹ Faced with pervasive alternatives to comparatively rigid state-centered administrative and judicial regimes and the growing technicization of legal discourse, “law’s only realistic option is to develop heterarchical forms of law that limit themselves to creating loose relationships between the fragments of law.”⁴⁰ Top-down approaches to regulation are understood as ineffective and outdated, domestic law having been somewhat dethroned both by its inability to reign in the emergence of a so-called “global law without a state,”⁴¹ and the social and economic complexity of its home turf. This mediatory portrait of law, as a relatively loose binding agent in a fragmented global society, differs enormously from traditional conceptions of both its authority and legitimacy.⁴²

Clearly, the explicit geography of these analyses is transnational, regardless of whether the focus in on norm migration or the emergence of new global legal regimes. While transnational legal theory presents an accurate account of many of the challenges faced by law in the contemporary era, its framework does not necessarily allow for explorations of strictly domestic legal globalizations or, more importantly, an understanding of the local societal and spatial effects produced by law’s globalization, whether transnational or domestic. In general, these lacunae can be attributed to the fact that fragmentation is largely understood as occurring along ‘social sectoral’ not ‘territorial lines.^’43 Transnational legal theory adopts an internal perspective on law, concerning itself with how new normative regimes emerge within law and link to other social systems, while also exploring its external relations, questioning both how a ‘global law beyond the state’ can be legitimated in the absence of a corresponding political and constitutional architecture⁴⁴ and how law can be engineered in order to steer increasingly globalized social relations.

While these are important points of inquiry, it is also arguable that this work raises other questions which remain beyond the theory’s current observational scope. When lawyers addressing globalization use jurisdictional lenses and conflict-of-laws metaphors⁴⁵ in order to understand contemporaneous processes of legal harmonization and fragmentation, they are perhaps also unwittingly referencing legal and social processes which play out in a manner which alters legal regimes understood as outside the ‘transnational’ paradigm and which effect spatial societal changes at a variety of local scales.

In general, many of the subjects of transnational law can be understood as constituent aspects of ongoing spatial and scalar transformations under globalization. Processes marked by de-hierarchization, privatization and legal down- and upscaling clearly represent the reorganization of institutional power within and vis-à-vis states. Legally addressing them from a perspective which takes not only law’s internal response to economic and social change into account, but also law’s constitutive properties, in terms of shaping the social and physical terrain in which it is enacted, opens a broader swath of law to legal analyses of globalization. Physical infrastructures largely accepted as central to economic globalization such as global cities and export processing zones, produce social relations and crises requiring local regulation.⁴⁶ Where other disciplines, such as geography and cultural studies, have made concerted efforts to explore globalization’s spatial, socioeconomic and cultural contours through place-based analyses (more often than not of urban societies) law’s own local/global dynamics have not received comparable treatment.

To do so requires a certain flattening of jurisdictional levels. It is important to note that legal jurisdictions are not organized in the manner of Russian nested dolls, particularly if they are understood both as blankly territorial and territorially relational expressions of law.⁴⁷ While the international can still easily, if woodenly, be distinguished from the national through weakened notions of sovereignty and national rules governing treaty ascension and adoption, and the transnational takes as a definitional pre-requisite the necessity of national boundary crossing, the bi- or trifurcation of national legal regimes occurs in a space which, while not territorially coterminous, or spatially similar, at points overlaps.

Put differently, domestic law is, in countries such as Canada, implemented within an increasingly uneven and socially, economically and culturally differentiated spatial environment. Just as transnational legal theory traces the sectoral differentiation of specialized legal regimes within a global society, domestic policy-making must take into account the economic and spatial dissagregation of post-Keynesian states. While this process is partially accounted for by constitutionalized divisions of legal competence between different jurisdictions, law’s uneven local application still remains somewhat hidden by longstanding jurisdictional constructs. Immigration law, for example, has local components which, in North America and Europe, are decidedly urban and require the legal change in other areas of law. Nonetheless, within legal scholarship, it is rarely discussed in this regard. Similarly, international trade law has only recently come within the ambit of an urban-oriented legal scholarship (and only with regard to conflicts between local and international law⁴⁸), despite the clear fact that its development over the past thirty-five years has drastically altered both the spatial and economic geography of nation-states and their cities.

B. Economic Geography

In setting out a case for engaging in local, urban explorations of law and globalization, it is helpful to assess the work of other disciplines engaged in similar endeavors. Both geographers and world-systems theorists have long understood that specific political-economic epochs are predicated on shifting spatial relations which transform institutional, monetary and social geographies within and outside of nation-states, a process sometimes referred to as “reterritorialization.”⁴⁹ David Harvey’s work, for example, insists that spatial reorganization is a central component of captial’s quest for continued expansion and stabilization. His concept of the “spatial fix,”⁵⁰ which he likens to an addict’s cravings, contends that “capitalism has to fix space (in immoveable structures of transport and communication nets, as well as in built environments of factories, roads, houses, water supplies, and other physical infrastructures) in order to overcome space.”⁵¹ While mainstream accounts of capitalist development often highlight new technologies, economic ideologies or new means of production as primary drivers of economic expansion, Harvey also recognizes that these processes produce new spatial relations and arrangements central to day-to-day lived experience.

Isolating the spatial attributes of economic change is valuable to a legal-theoretical perspective because doing so necessitates at least a partial focus on concrete, local geographies. As a consequence, non-national geographical constructs (such as the transnational) are no longer exclusively required in order to discuss intersections of law and globalization. Instead, these processes can be located as constituent aspects of national political-economic fabrics, as Sassen’s concept of ‘denationalization’ has demonstrated. Her contention that “particular institutional components of the national state begin to function as the institutional home for the operation of powerful dynamics constitutive of what we could describe as ‘global capital’”⁵² raises important questions about which components are salient, who has jurisdiction over them, and what effect their reorientation has on local societies.

As mentioned, these ‘components,’ such as international trade legislation, are not only those aspects of domestic law and policy that are intuitively associated with broad patterns of economic change. The spatial components of these shifts reveal pervasive changes in areas governed by a host of different legislation and institutional bodies. Neil Brenner’s analyses of contemporary Europe’s economic geography,⁵³ for example, argue that European states are processes of institutional “rescaling” carried out in order to better facilitate capital accumulation in the globalized era.⁵⁴ In addition to the upward extension of legal competence to the European Union, Brenner contends that “the current round of capitalist globalisation has entailed a territorial reoganisation of the urbanisation process simultaneously on global, national and urban-regional scales.”⁵⁵ Highlighting the territorial disaggregation of post-Keynesian states, Brenner, like many other authors,⁵⁶ argues that the corollary component of city and city-region’s increased economic importance has brought renewed attention to the institutional arrangements which govern and, more and more, privilege them. Like Harvey, this analysis identifies urban-oriented economies as central components of globalization’s current ‘spatial fix.’⁵⁷ Cities, increasingly arbiters of international capital flows, are unevenly granted increased relevance within national political hierarchies. From this perspective, they are not merely passive containers of global capital and culture, but entities being actively and institutionally groomed in order to bolster national economic competition.⁵⁸

In some respects, it is difficult to translate geographers’ observations into the lexicons of legal and political theory. While some cities have emerged as nascent actors in various configurations of national, supranational, and global governance,⁵⁹ overzealous ascriptions of global importance arguably belie cities’ weak political and legal power. Cities, for obvious reasons, are not always equated with either the governments which run them or the jurisdictional boundaries which legally circumscribe them.⁶⁰ As such, arguments about broad patterns of ‘rescaling’ need to reexamined within concrete legal architectures.

Nonetheless, these observations have the potential to add important contributions to ongoing work related to law and globalization. Just as certain strands of legal theory have traced legal paradigm shifts since the 1970s, charting law’s changing role through the welfare state through widespread deregulation and (potentially) back again⁶¹ and have, in the process, reformulated legal scholarship on the basis of changing social and economic circumstances,⁶² strands of economic geography have had to abandon the factory as the primary signifier of nationally-organized economies and focus on uneven territorial development centered around urban service economies.⁶³ Both these narratives are grafted over the same historical period, and to a certain point, tell a similar story based on comparable patterns of decentralization and disaggregation.

What follows is an initial attempt to find complementary aspects of each account. While doing so is best served by a careful, historical overview of law’s role in influencing the scalar and spatial changes described, such an approach is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, two developments are addressed – immigration law and municipal governance reform – and treated as largely unacknowledged aspects of law’s response to globalization and central components of law’s role in city-building.

1. Case Studies: Immigration Law and Municipal Governance Reform:
   1. Municipal Governance Reform in Ontario

Like their American equivalents, Canadian cities exist at the behest of the province in which they are located. They have no explicit constitutional status, with s.98(2) of the Constitution Act granting provinces the exclusive right to make laws concerning municipalities. Legally, cities are classified as public corporations and charged with serving the public interest. This, however, was not always the case. There was no distinction between public and private corporations until the 19^th century and, until that point, cities had long been understood as carrying out mercantile functions. While the history of this earlier transformation has been well documented,⁶⁴ there is considerable evidence that the role of the city as an economic unit in competition with its peers has gained support in recent decades.⁶⁵ This idea, that cities are engaged in global competition for capital and investment has begun to affect the way that urban governance is envisioned and carried out. Using Ontario and Toronto as an example, the rest of this section traces this line of thought and explores its effect on both governing legislation and Toronto’s relationship to the legal hierarchies within which it is embedded.

Until the 1990s, municipal legislation in Ontario largely followed the model established by the Baldwin Act of 1849. The first introduction of general municipal legislation in Canada, the act was based around two rationales: elected local representation and provincially proscribed legal power. This latter characteristic is often understood as adhering to ‘Dillon’s Rule,’ an American legal doctrine, which argues for the strict interpretation of state conferred municipal legal power. Until 2001, municipal legislation in Ontario followed a ‘laundry list’ model, wherein municipal legal power was highly specified (and limited to enumerated competences). As a consequence, cities hoping to increase their legal power had to ask provinces to explicitly grant them the right to do so. Perhaps the most striking example of provincial power over cities in Canada was the passage of the City of Toronto Act, 1997, which, against strong protest, amalgamated the six municipalities which had comprised Metro Toronto.

While this approach to municipal governance had long been contentious, and there had been calls for reform – either legislatively or constitutionally – since at least the 1970s,⁶⁶ almost no progress was made in Canada until the 1990s.⁶⁷ While the impetus for municipal reform in Ontario can be attributed to a number of factors, including favorable decisions in the Courts⁶⁸ and changes in other provincial jurisdictions, Toronto’s receipt of specific governing legislation in 2006 was at least partially inspired by a growing awareness of its economic heft, arguable need to be globally competitive and the social and cultural challenges that its sheer size and diversity create. In other words, Toronto’s globalization, in all senses of the term, offered plausible reasons for treating the city as legally different (though the extent of this difference is definitely questionable) than its other Ontario municipalities.

While the 2001 reform of Municipal legislation in Ontario was notable for its reluctance to actually grant significant autonomy to Ontario cities,⁶⁹ it did open up space for continued debate about how Toronto should be governed. The lead up to the drafting of the City of Toronto Act, 2006 which was steered by a round of intergovernmental negotiations held under the auspices of the “Joint Ontario-Toronto Task Force,” the stated aim of which was to explore how to “make Toronto more fiscally sustainable, autonomous and accountable and how to provide it with the tools it needs to thrive in the global economy.”⁷⁰ Their findings, published in a report entitled Building a 21^st Century City, explicitly tie Ontario’s success to Toronto’s: “Empowering its capital city will in turn position Ontario to successfully compete in the globalized economy and provide a quality of life for its residents that is second to none.⁷¹ Furthermore, the report finds that a precondition of this mutually beneficial relationship – a competitive Toronto – requires more municipal legal empowerment and revenue raising capability. Taking umbrage with the Harris government’s decision to download services onto Toronto without providing corresponding revenue streams, the reports warns that a repeat of this policy would “further undermine the City’s fiscal position and competitiveness.” ⁷²

As a substantive document, the now-enacted City of Toronto is somewhat difficult to square with the lofty rhetoric which preceded its passage.⁷³ Nonetheless, certain substantive provisions can be understood as marking a much-needed relaxation on top-down control over cities and as a reorganization of institutional arrangements and power balances predicated by Toronto’s unique status within Ontario and Canada. The act’s preamble, setting the tone, stresses two different points, the city’s economic importance and need to “[thrive] in the global economy” and the necessity of intergovernmental cooperation, hardly a priority in past Ontario administrations. These objectives are reflected in an interpretative clause stating that city powers shall “be interpreted broadly,”⁷⁴ a newly introduced system of authorization by purpose⁷⁵ which allows the city to “provide any service of thing that [it] considers necessary,”⁷⁶ a broad list of legislative powers,⁷⁷ and the ability to negotiate agreements directly with the federal government.⁷⁸ Coupled with limited new taxation powers, the act represents a relatively transformative approach to municipal governance in Ontario to the extent that it is focused specifically on Toronto, allows for more flexibility and room for experimentation in municipal practice and stresses the need for collaboration between different governments.

1. 1. Immigration Law and Regulated Professions

Perhaps more than any other federal policy, immigration law has shaped contemporary Toronto, a city widely known for its cultural diversity. However, until the late 1960s, Canada’s immigration policy was explicitly racist, ⁷⁹ allowing denial of entry on the basis of climatic unsuitability and other discriminatory provisions. Faced with increasing international criticism, a reform process was instituted in 1967⁸⁰ which marked the beginnings of contemporary practice. In particular, a specific link between economic development and immigration was elaborated and a point system emphasizing professional training, educational history, work experience and language skills was introduced. Immigrants who hope to have their experience counted towards their application must peruse the National Occupation Classification List, which enumerates various occupations.⁸¹ Ostensibly, the jobs listed are domestically understaffed, or considered sufficiently professional/skilled to warrant residency.

The relationship between labour and immigration remains strong. The current act, the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act 2002 establishes “the development of a strong and prosperous Canadian economy” as one of its key objectives. Statistics support this aspiration. During the 1990s, immigration was responsible for 70% of Canada’s labour market growth.⁸² It is projected that this figure will reach 100% by 2011.⁸³

Despite a focus on economic growth through tailored immigration policy, integrating new immigrants into the Canadian job market has proven difficult and provoked warranted disappointment. Captured by the now iconic story of a doctor driving a taxi cab, immigrant underemployment has become a serious issue in Canada’s cities. In some respects, the problem can be separated into two categories: immigrants who seek jobs in regulated professions and those that do not.

Essentially, regulated professions (which include doctors, lawyers, engineers etc.) are administered by a body with the sole right to grant a license to practice that profession. In Canada, provincial governments generally delegate this authority to bodies such as the Law Society of Ontario, ostensibly so that they can protect the integrity of professions, and maintain standards which align with the public’s interest. These bodies then determine who may join the association, what is required to remain a member and set standards of competence.

This arrangement becomes particularly problematic when those without domestic experience attempt to exercise their chosen profession. Many immigrants are forced to enter expensive and often difficult to access accreditation programs, or return to universities for further training. At face value a clear logical conflict has emerged between the rationales of Canada’s immigration policy and of its professional regulatory bodies.

Legally, several amelioratory strategies have been discussed or attempted, whether in the form of court challenges,⁸⁴ procedural reform and standards harmonization. These strategies have been carried out within various jurisdictions. In 2006, for example, the Ontario government passed the Fair Access to Regulated Professions Act. The act appoints a ‘fairness commissioner’ to assess whether regulatory associations have adopted ‘fair and transparent’ processes. It also provides for penalties in the absence of such.  Human Resources Canada has also established a “foreign credential recognition program” that provides financial support to “sector councils, industries, regulatory bodies, provinces/territories, immigrant serving organizations and educational institutions in order to develop a pan-Canadian approach to assessing and recognizing foreign credentials.” ⁸⁵ The city of Toronto runs locally based settlement programs.⁸⁶

While each of these approaches has various merits, the origin of this issue is complex and interesting enough to evade straightforward solutions. The most relevant questions related to the non-recognizance of foreign credentials, is why the discriminatory and inefficient aspects of this process have emerged at all, and why they have garnered attention in major urban centers. Any cursory examination of the criteria designating skilled workers reveals that they are a product of the shift towards a knowledge-based economy. Cognizant of the fact that Canada’s immigration policy has had an economic rationale for some time, one commentator points out that:

historically, immigration policy in Canada has responded to the stages of [Canada’s] economic development. When agriculture was the economic priority Canada recruited immigrants for agricultural work. When priorities shifted to those of an industrializing economy, Canada recruited immigrants for construction and manufacturing.⁸⁷

As Canada’s economy increasingly depends less on agriculture and manufacturing, and more on ‘informational’ and service industries, foreign credential recognition emerges as an important issue. In prior stages of economic development “assessment of foreign credentials was essentially irrelevant. In the knowledge economy immigrants’ credentials are important and assessment of these credentials is critical to the success of the immigration program.”⁸⁸ Employers and regulatory associations are under increasing pressure to rethink what counts as ‘valid experience’ and modify their standards in accordance with the demands of immigrant applicants and the labour market in which they are embedded.

At the end of the day, this is an issue that is indicative of many of the challenges faced by law in globalizing societies. Essentially an urban issue,⁸⁹ cities bear the social costs of the problem. Ensuring that immigration policy, job availability and professional regulation do not continue to produce self-defeating and contradictory results requires creative thinking about the role of law and policy in structuring solutions to these problems, as well as the joint involvement of different legal authorities.

1. Conclusion:

Each of the above case studies is demonstrative of local legal responses to urban issues catalyzed by the transformation of the global economy over the past forty years. While municipal governance is a clearly associated with cities, it has traditionally been a very local concern, associated more with the institution of public order, planning and signage then with the attraction of global capital. Immigration, on the other hand, clearly has international dimensions, but is also one of the final hallmarks of national sovereignty⁹⁰ and squarely within the bounds of federal jurisdiction. Nonetheless, cities such as Toronto are at the frontlines of the type of injustices and conflicts that immigration policy can produce, whether the underemployment discussed above or the fallout from diaspora groups coming from conflict zones,⁹¹ just as much as they are also competing for immigrant skill and labour.⁹² What these issues have in common, is that they are both the product of the spatial and economic disaggregation of post-Keynesian states. In the past, both immigration law and municipal law were uniformly applied. Toronto had the same governing legislation as the rest of Ontario’s municipalities and the availability of comparatively low-skilled jobs did not necessitate further legal involvement in immigrant settlement practice.

Notably, neither of these issues has resulted in one specific jurisdiction exercising complete control. Instead, they have both pointed to the need for collaboration between different bodies, or in the case of immigration, the expression of increased regulatory authority by a previously uninvolved jurisdiction. This is unsurprising. Globalization’s spatially disaggregative tendencies have the effect of producing profoundly uneven societal configurations, regardless if these are blanketed under the same jurisdictional authority. In response, law – like it has done with regard to the complexities of lex mercatoria – is required to be more and more specific with regard to its involvement in society. From a scalar perspective, this produces precisely the type of effect that Neil Brenner and others discuss, resulting in a reorganization of institutional power based on the need to assure continued capital accumulation.

While the examples in this paper are perhaps minor in comparison to ongoing developments with regard to foreign investment or trade law, they do demonstrate that the type of world-scale transformations that globalization has catalyzed reach down to the most local of scales, and that law is constantly in a position of attempting to negotiate the social and economic effects produced. In many respects, isolating these processes is assisted by exploring the urban. Cities’ concrete geography, observable social configurations, complexity and diversity offer a unique site for studying global/local interactions. While this has long been practice in many disciplines, law too can benefit from such an approach.