In my book Bridging Divides: The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity (1999) University of California, I explore the impact of the European Union on its member states' legal systems. I am specifically interested in the extent to which people's ideas about nationalism and their national identities are changing as laws relating to citizenship, immigration and border controls are breaking down the idea of the sovereign nation-state.

Two hundred years after Napoleon planned to invade England by means of a tunnel, the completion in 1994 of a fast-rail link between Great Britain and the European mainland symbolizes the disintegration of conventional state borders. While the Channel Tunnel precariously affirms the ideal of a united Europe, it also brings to the fore questions of boundaries between the first and third worlds, colonizers and colonized, and 'East' and the 'West'. Bridging Divides describes far more than an engineering feat. It charts the collision of national memory and current history, and maps the shifting geographies of nationalism, postcolonialism, and legal autonomy in the complicated age of globalization.

In the volume I have co-edited with Peter Fitzpatrick, Laws of the Postcolonial (1999) University of Michigan Press, we explore the how modern law has constituted the "west" as the antithesis of various "others", such as the savages and barbarians cast beyond its supposedly civilized range. We specifically question the current consensus on the international influence of western law and attempt to show the neo-imperial and postcolonial implications of legal globalization.