In order to establish and evaluate the significance of changing socio-legal boundaries and how these are mirrored in citizenship, cross-border formations of the social and citizenship rules must be discussed. The first part of this paper deals with changes in social boundaries across state borders and presents three generations of transnational studies. Based on this, the second part asks how legal boundaries have changed in the case of dual citizenship and supranational social citizenship. Citizenship is a particularly important issue because it sits at the intersection of social and legal boundaries. There is a growing tolerance toward dual citizenship and the evolution of supranational citizenship, one in which migrants enjoy a transnational life that is supported by the implementation of human rights principles in national constitutions, legislation and in European Union court rulings.

In recent years, West European supermarkets have been playing an active role in the global regulation of food safety. They have developed several transnational food safety standards and compelled suppliers of food products around the world to acquire certification under these standards. Why and how did supermarkets do this? This article explores the emergence and evolution of transnational supermarket standards by analyzing the development of GlobalGAP, one of the most commonly implemented supermarket standards on farms throughout the world. In the literature, the emergence of transnational regulation is often attributed to one or two factors that play an important role at a particular moment in time. The main argument made in this article is that the emergence of transnational supermarket standards is best understood when it is studied as a process. The development of GlobalGAP includes four main characteristics which may be helpful in analyzing the emergence of other transnational private standards.

This paper presents a reflection on the theoretical work on the social working of law of the past two decades. It is argued that early assumptions, that legal models were becoming increasingly globalised, creating an increasingly uniform body of law, have not come true. The global spread of neo-capitalism has not only given rise to de-juridification, it has also engendered juridification in which ever more sectors of social life, from small scale to global, are being colonised by law. This development is initiated from above and below in equal measure, and concerns not only the law of nation states, but also law created by other actors, including religious law of various provenance. The paper argues that great progress has been made in understanding how transnational law is generated and how law is transnationalised, but that the ways in which these processes work when actors actually use this transnationalised law in contexts of legal pluralism are not yet adequately understood. The paper presents a perspective on transnationalisation of law that is grounded in space, a perspective that may aid our understanding of the social working of law in transnational contexts. The first section provides a brief survey of some of the main academic approaches to processes of transnationalisation. The second section addresses the issue of location and considers what happens in settings where actors use transnationalising law. The conclusions discuss the value of transnational space and transnational legal space as concepts for the analysis of transnationalising law.

Violations of human rights by transnational corporations and by other ‘private’ global actors raise problems that signal the limits of the traditional doctrine of ‘horizontal effects’. To overcome them, constitutional law doctrine needs to be complemented by perspectives from legal theory and sociology of law. This allows new answers to the following questions: What is the validity basis of human rights in transnational ‘private’ regimes – extraterritorial effect, colère public or external pressures on autonomous law making in global regimes? Do they result in protective duties of the states or in direct human rights obligations of private transnational actors? What does it mean to generalise state-directed human rights and to respecify them for different social spheres? Are societal human rights limited to ‘negative’ rights or is institutional imagination capable of developing ‘positive’ rights – rights of inclusion and participation in various social fields? Are societal human rights directed exclusively against corporate actors or can they be extended to counteract structural violence of anonymous social processes? Can such broadened perspectives of human rights be re-translated into the practice of public interest litigation?

Examining the function of human rights in the semiosphere requires a strategy of differentiation: the dissolution of politics into political moments (politics, it is argued, is not a system, but a form of discourse); the distinction between discourse and communication; the concept of systemic paranomic functionings. Paranomia is a situation generated by the pathological closure of discourses, in which knowledge of valid and observed norms obscures power. Fundamental rights are the movement of communication, claims about redistributing powers, directed against paranomic functionings. Rethinking the debate about the third party effect implies that validity and coherence must be differentiated for the development of the ‘matrix argument’.