Law's Territory (A History of Jurisdiction)

People are so accustomed to territorial jurisdiction that it is hard for many to imagine that government could be organized any other way. Despite, several hundred years of acclimation, people continue to be disoriented, baffled, and thrilled by the consequences of jurisdictional legality. Territorial jurisdiction is nothing less than the map of the law's interaction with society. It embodies the deepest tensions and conflicts in aspirations for human civilizations. If territorial jurisdiction seems inevitable, it is because the aspirations and fears it embodies are inevitable. The organic jurisdiction vindicates aspirations for community, social harmony, oedipal completion, the nostalgia of the whole and the one. However, it also evokes terror at the suffocation, the destruction of the unique ego, totalitarianism. The spirit of community threatens to become the mentality of the mob; group culture bleeds into the groupthink of the cult.