A couple of lawyers’ old friends: ‘Sources’ and ‘Jurisdictions’. In their parlance, these notions are often associated to modern, ‘positive’ law.

The idea of ‘legal formants’ has been introduced to complete the picture, flexibilising it, making it more accurate, nuanced, realistic; an idea associated to comparative, socio-legal, anthropologic studies.

With ‘Roots’ and ‘space’ geographers, historians, political scientists get involved. These are certainly less frequent notions in legal circles: we may still wish to make friends with them, to enrich our perception of legal phenomena.

‘Roots’ is often associated to history of law and related discourses – if legal formants may complete a picture, legal roots do complete the movie, so to speak.

‘Space’: an open notion, perhaps a non-notion in modern legal discourse, generic enough to include every spatial dimension of legal phenomena: dissemination of movie theatres and other forms of diffusion of the various show-biz products could be the appropriate metaphor here, including space law and virtual property.

A legal discourse that goes beyond the checkboards, or the series of juxtaposed swimming pools – Tetris-style – containing water from their respective individual sources, produced by modern, Westphalian conceptions of the law. It goes, instead, to normative forces producing their effects without a precise geographic boundary: like radio stations, magnetic or gravitational fields. Or like intricate sets of rivers, lakes, canals, ponds, infiltrated wetlands, oceans, weather, all contributing to a locally diversified but still unitary eco-system and bio-sphere of water, landscape, vegetation, fauna.

A discourse on normative forces and the fuzziness of their historic and geographic reach.

Law also operates in a global ‘space’ and over time. The Faculty of Law celebrates 30 years since the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) (1989) has come into operation. The rights of the child have been celebrated all over the world – but what are their roots and how does the Convention and national laws function in this space of time? The following related themes (but not limited to) are of interest: the successes and failures of this instrument (or similar instruments); African customs and children’s rights; religious systems and children’s rights; juvenile justice; influence of the Convention on national legislation; children and conflict; exploitation of children; rights of the child within a social context; best interest of the child.