Conflicting Philosophies And International Trade Law

This book reveals how conflicting worldviews are at the root of public controversies on policy and trade issues. It highlights the particularly controversial disputes at the level of the World Trade Organization in the case of regulating beef-hormones and GMOs, aiming to show how negotiators of international agreements, members of dispute settlement bodies, and policy makers in general could have recourse to concepts of other disciplines such as epistemology and philosophy in order to address deadlocked legal disputes. Ultimately, the book is a manifesto for independent and critical research.

The interaction between state, transnational and international law is overlapping and often conflicting. Yet despite this messiness and multiplicity, law still creates obligations for its subjects. Despite its plurality, law still claims some kind of authority. The implications of this plurality of law can be troubling. It generates uncertainty for law-users over which law they are bound by, or for law-makers over the limits of their authority. Thus the practical problem is not plurality of law in itself, rather confusion over law's authority in such pluralist circumstances. Roughan argues that understanding authority in such pluralist circumstances requires a new conception of 'relative authority.' This book seeks to provide the theoretical tools needed to bring the disciplines examining legal and constitutional pluralism, into more direct engagement with theories of authority, by examining the one practice in which they are all interested: the practice of public authority.

What does justice demand in international trade regulation? And how far does World Trade Organization (WTO) law respond to those demands? Whether our focus is developing countries, struggling industries, or environmental protection, distributive conflict is a pervasive feature of international economic law. Despite this, we lack an adequate theory of distributive justice for this domain. Drawing on philosophical approaches to global justice, this book advances a novel theory of justice in trade regulation, and applies this to explain and critique the law of the WTO. Integrating theoretical and doctrinal approaches, it demonstrates the potential for political theory to illuminate and inform the progressive development of WTO law, including rules on border measures, discrimination, trade remedies and domestic regulation. Written from an interdisciplinary perspective, accessible to lawyers, philosophers and political scientists, the book will appeal both to theorists interested in building bridges from theory to practice, and practitioners seeking new perspectives on existing problems.

No social life is possible without order. Order being the most constituent element of society, it is not surprising that so many theories have been developed to explain what social order is and how it is possible, as well as to explore the features that social order acquires in its different dimensions. The book leads these many theories of social order back to a few main matrices for the use of theoretical and practical reason, which are defined as 'paradigms of order'. The plurality of conceptual constructs regarding social order is therefore reduced to a manageable number of theoretical patterns and an intellectual map is produced in which the most significant differences between paradigms are clearly outlined. Furthermore, the 'paradigmatic revolutions' are addressed that marked the most relevant turning points in the way in which a 'well-ordered society' should be understood. Against this background, the question is discussed on the theoretical and practical perspectives for a cosmopolitan society as the only suitable possibility to meet the global challenges with which we are all presently confronted.

Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Public International Law and Human Rights, grade: A plus, Jawaharlal Nehru University, course: Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.), language: English, abstract: From the beginning of the twenty-first century the international community started addressing the issue of fragmentation of international law. In 2000, the International Law Commission (ILC) decided to include the topic "[r]isks ensuing from the fragmentation of international law" into its long-term programme of work. This initiative raises some basic questions: is international law a fragmented system? If it is so, what is the problem with the fragmentation? and how can the problem be resolved? This dissertation mainly revolves around these three major issues. It assumes that today's fragmented international law is part of historical evolution or process. In contemporary times, the term 'fragmentation' is commonly used to refer to the slicing up of international law 'into regional or functional regimes that cater for special audiences with special interests and ethos'. The most notable functional regimes are international trade law, environmental law, human rights law, humanitarian law, law of the sea and so on - when there is a collision between these regimes - than the conflict of norms becomes an unavoidable consequence - because each regime seeks favorable treatment towards its own. The absence of normative and institutional hierarchy in international law means that the evolution of such regimes is perceived by some as posing a threat to the coherence, effectiveness and predictability of international law. Others see these regimes as contributing to the development of international law. To respond to the problem of fragmentation, the ILC examined the regimes in detail and tentatively concluded that these specialized legal regimes are merely informal labels with no normative value per se - hence, it viewed that they