The contemporary coexistence of State laws and other meaningful non-State normative orders around the globe presents an important challenge to both jurisprudes and comparatists. The role of non-State norms—trans-national, national, and sub-national—appears to undermine the State-centred focus of much contemporary legal philosophy. This is perhaps especially true for the legal positivism of Anglophone analytical jurisprudence, but recognition of the importance of non-State norms also problematises the long-dominant model of comparative law in which different jurisdictions were divided into discrete pan-national ‘families’ of common parentage. Instead, legal traditions are complex, dynamic, and hybrid, both with respect to laws and other norms. In his Concept of Law from a Transnational Perspective, Detlef von Daniels attempts to employ existing movements in legal philosophy to encompass and explain both State laws and other norms. This allows, he suggests, ‘for an improved perception of the phenomena we face in a globalised world (Preface)’. The work combines both a positivist critique of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and a reconstruction of H.L.A. Hart's jurisprudence in line with growing scholarship on ‘legal pluralism’.

The book falls naturally into three sections. In the first, the author presents a critique of Habermas’ understanding of law. Much of this centres on the thin account of Western social and legal development, whether explicit or implicit, in the latter's thought. Habermas maintains ‘a concept of law that is from the outset oriented toward state law’ (p 73). The result is that his philosophy neglects the essential role played by non-State normative orders. Von Daniels points out, for example, the historical role of canon law and of guilds. He insists, too, that modern humanitarian law and the lex mercatoria (developed in practice by merchants) show that even now ‘law creation is still not an exclusive domain of states’ (p 70). Setting aside debates about the status of the contemporary lex mercatoria, the author is certainly correct in insisting that a legal theory that fails to account for legal and normative hybridity in either the past or the present provides little explanatory power or conceptual clarity.

Von Daniels’ second section provides a more constructive analysis, a reformulation of Hart's thought to encompass more than State or ‘municipal’ laws. While the Englishman's theory, like that of Habermas, reflects Western and presentist biases, it may be viewed not as an attempt ‘to summarize anthropological or historical evidence but … as a conceptual clarification that allows conceiving a constantly recurring feature found in all societies’ (p 110). Greatly simplified, Hart's argument was that a legal system is a union of ‘primary rules’ of law and ‘secondary rules’. The secondary rules are, in effect, rules about the primary rules. Most famously, Hart suggested that a ‘rule of recognition’ allows for the identification of valid primary rules or positive laws. In the spirit, if not the letter, of Hart's thought, von Daniels’ identifies legal rules as decisive multilateral social rules that refer to justice. This allows him to differentiate them from either moral rules and rules of etiquette. More importantly, the author's reconstruction makes an important distinction between legal ‘regimes’ and ‘systems’. The former lack the complex institutionalization and secondary rules of the latter. But, von Daniels argues, neither of these characteristics is unique to positive law. A more meaningful criterion for a legal system is the use of unconditioned force appropriately associated with the positive law of the State. Even so, legal regimes must include, in the descriptive theory of the author, not only those ‘established by states or international law, but also churches and associations like the Red Cross’ (p 155). Simplifying greatly, von Daniels suggests that contingent and historical ‘linkage rules’ are essential to his ‘general descriptive legal theory’. That is, ‘the theory is not purely conceptual in the sense that it reveals “eternal” truths about concepts but instead, reveals characteristic features of certain former and current practices’ (p 165). As a matter of historical fact, legal regimes and legal systems not only coexisted, but were intertwined with one another in complex relationships.

In the final section, von Daniels critically discusses both dominant Anglophone analytical jurisprudence and more recent efforts at a ‘general jurisprudence’ that parallel his own attempt to move beyond a narrow focus on State law. The legal philosophers Joseph Raz and Ronald Dworkin serve as representatives, admittedly of very different types, of analytical jurisprudence. The author argues that each neglects the importance of non-State normative orders, both in Western history and around the world, In what is ‘something of a family dispute’ (p 197), von Daniels is also critical of Brian Tamanaha and William Twining's separate attempts to formulate a ‘general jurisprudence’ that covers both State laws and other non-State norms. He acknowledges that both jurists, each well-versed in sociological movements in legal philosophy, share many of the aims and elements of his own thought. But where von Daniels’ theory is descriptive, he suggests that Tamanaha adopts a conceptual analysis that tries to capture all legal phenomena at all times, notwithstanding his radically conventionalist account. And he faults Twining for conflating a theory of ‘general jurisprudence’ with ‘general jurisprudence’ as a discipline. In sum, neither ‘analytical’ nor ‘general’ jurisprudence adopts the descriptive, but critical and hermeneutical, method that von Daniels believes to be necessary.

Given the author's argument for a descriptive theory, the book might have provided a more thorough overview of legal and normative hybridity in the Western past and the global present. Explicit engagement with comparatists would also have been productive. The work of Patrick Glenn, Werner Mesnki, and Esin Örücü, among others, would have provided von Daniels with both useful allies and foils. However The Concept of Law from a Transnational Perspective is an important addition to contemporary legal debates. Attentive to the jurisprudential traditions of the past, von Daniels succeeds in placing legal and normative orders in a wider frame. His theory offers tantalizing possibilities for the future.