This chapter will present two case studies from the global North – in fact, from the pinnacle of Northern power, the United States. It will take a vantage point grounded in what some have dubbed “the South in the North,” meaning persons and communities in wealthy countries who are marginalized or otherwise disadvantaged by things as they are, groups like factory workers and low-income people of color, who have relatively little social power and who enjoy increasingly little economic security.

The two cases presented arguably constitute examples of what Santos calls “subaltern cosmopolitan legality” (2002:479), law-making and law-challenging projects that link the local and the global in ways that unsettle global inequality and exclusion (see also Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito's chapter in this volume). My hope is that the experiences recounted in these case studies will illuminate some of the challenges confronted by those who want to help realize the compelling and questionable dream that Santos and others have held up for our contemplation – that of egalitarian and emancipatory global transformation from below.

Both efforts described here were triggered and enabled by what I am going to call “strategic global contact points.”