1 Chapter – What is the context in “law in context“? Julia Eckert Law’s Alternatives In today’s world, there are very few situations in which a law is not confronted with normative alternatives or normative commentaries that rely on reasonings reaching beyond the normative system that a particular law originates in. Law will more often than not be articulated in the light of normative alternatives in a particular field of social interaction, bringing to the fore the fundamental interpretative indeterminacy of any law. This has probably often been so in earlier times as well, and the centralisation of law in the state was but a short historical (and geographically limited) fiction. However, the current situation of normative plurality has a possibly more intense potential of the mutual information of different normative orders, and of comparison between them.. The globalisation of law, or rather the transnational movement of various (legal) norms and different normative orders, has often aimed at the homogenisation of norms. Some of these movements, such as many legal processes within the European Union, but also those of GATT and TRIPS, have explicitly aimed at standardisation. Others, such as rights discourse, have furthered, or, some would say, forced comparability by establishing legal categories that structure the possible articulations of issues and concerns in a particular manner. Overall, they have at the same time probably increased legal pluralism and, more importantly, increased the perception of the potential validity of normative alternatives. Claims to validity have to be defended, not simply against their possible alternatives, but against their own perceptible particularity. 1 We might 1 This can also take the form of fierce rejections of such alternatives; they would not need to be so fiercely rejected were they not actual normative possibilities.