Dr Jennifer Lander is Lecturer in Law at De Montfort University of Leicester, where she teaches public law and researches the constitutional dimensions of economic globalisation. Her new book Transnational Law and State Transformation: The Case of Extractive Development in Mongolia has been recently published with Routledge (2020).

Book blurb:

Dr Lander’s talk will focus on the key conceptual contributions of her new monograph to the socio-legal literature on transnational law, constitutionalism and development. The monograph offers an empirical study of the powerful, co-constitutive relations between state, market and law in the global political economy, through an in-depth case study of natural resource-based development in Mongolia. The key conceptual argument of the book is that distinct processes of legal, political and economic transformation together promote practical re-constitutionalisation within the national state. Empirically, the monograph shows how the pursuit of extractive development in Mongolia has introduced transnational legal norms as well as forms of market-based constituent power within the apparatus of the state which reconfigure central state institutions, the relationship between central and sub-national institutions, as well as state-citizen relations. The realignment of state power along these three critical axes evidences a process of state transformation and de facto constitutional change. The monograph contributes to the wider transnational law and development literatures by emphasising – empirically and conceptually – the pressing need to refocus attention on the national state as the key node through which “global” transformations occur in order to fully comprehend the realities of contemporary constitutionalism.