Global mobility is marked by deep inequities that hinge on the central role of the state in controlling access to its territory. It has become difficult to think of mobility, then, as anything but the exception to a regime devoted to controlled immobility. What kind of legal legacies and imaginaries, by contrast, might help us rethink global mobilities in a pluralistic way? This paper draws on the domestic tradition of “roaming rights” as a metaphor for what might be a presumptive right to at least pass through foreign territory, focusing particularly on non-migratory mobility (i.e.: travel). Roaming rights emerge in the Nordic countries (“every man’s right”) and, more recently, the UK, against the background of a relentless centuries-long drive to enclosure. They can be understood as a customary residue that carried over and was folded into legal modernity. There is a distance, of course, between a domestic/private and international law/public regime, but property and sovereignty have histories that are in many ways conjoined. Moreover, international law already knows of notions of free passage and transit (for example, in territorial waters or international straits) as well as ideas about vested rights. More radically, roaming rights, although they may not always have been described as such, have deeper origins, often extending to this day, in indigenous traditions and the colonial encounter, the Medieval circulation of pilgrims and traders, or traditional pastoral mobilities. The article inquires about the conditions under which these pre-modern but parallel legacies might be reclaimed as part of a pluralistic understanding of international law, emphasizing the radical potentialities of reimagining global mobility as operating through a basic right to roam.

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