Making Transnational Law Work In The Global Economy

This tribute to Professor Detlev Vagts of the Harvard Law School brings together his colleagues at Harvard and the American Society of International Law, as well as academics, judges and practitioners, many of them his former students. Their essays span the entire spectrum of modern transnational law: international law in general; transnational economic law; and transnational lawyering and dispute resolution. The contributors evaluate established fields of transnational law, such as the protection of property and investment, and explore new areas of law which are in the process of detaching themselves from the nation-state such as global administrative law and the regulation of cross-border lawyering. The implications of decentralised norm-making, the proliferation of dispute settlement mechanisms and the rising backlash against global legal interdependence in the form of demands for preserving state legal autonomy are also examined.

This tribute to Professor Detlev Vagts of the Harvard Law School brings together his colleagues at Harvard and the American Society of International Law, as well as academics, judges and practitioners, many of them his former students. Their essays span the entire spectrum of modern transnational law: international law in general; transnational economic law; and transnational lawyering and dispute resolution. The contributors evaluate established fields of transnational law, such as the protection of property and investment, and explore new areas of law which are in the process of detaching themselves from the nation-state such as global administrative law and the regulation of cross-border lawyering. The implications of decentralised norm-making, the proliferation of dispute settlement mechanisms and the rising backlash against global legal interdependence in the form of demands for preserving state legal autonomy are also examined.

Poverty, inequality, and dispossession accompany economic globalization. Bringing together three international law scholars, this book addresses how international law and its regimes of trade, investment, finance, as well as human rights, are implicated in the construction of misery, and how international law is producing, reproducing, and embedding injustice and narrowing the alternatives that might really serve humanity. Adopting a pluralist approach, the authors confront the unconscionable dimensions of the global economic order, the false premises upon which they are built, and the role of international law in constituting and sustaining them. Combining insights from radical critiques, political philosophy, history, and critical development studies, the book explores the pathologies at work in international economic law today. International law must abide by the requirements of justice if it is to make a call for compliance with it, but this work claims it drastically fails do so. In a legal order structured around neoliberal ideologies rather than principles of justice, every state can and does grab what it can in the economic sphere on the basis of power and interest, legally so and under colour of law. This book examines how international law on trade and foreign investment and the law and norms on global finance has been shaped to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of others. It studies how a set of principles, in the form of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), that could have laid the groundwork for a more inclusive international law without even disrupting its market-orientation, were nonetheless undermined. As for international human rights law, it is under the terms of global capitalism that human rights operate. Before we can understand how human rights can create more just societies, we must first expose the ways in which they reflect capitalist society and how they assist in reproducing the underlying terms of immiseration that will continue to create the need for human rights protection. This book challenges conventional justifications of economic globalization and eschews false choices. It is not about whether one is "for" or "against" international trade, foreign investment, or global finance. The issue is to resolve how, if we are to engage in trade, investment, and finance, we do so in a manner that is accountable to persons whose lives are affected by international law. The deployment of human rights for their part must be considered against the ubiquity of neoliberal globalization under law, and not merely as a discrete, benevolent response to it.

This work comprises 24 linked essays by leading transatlantic scholars in international law and the social sciences examining the sociolegal aspects of multi-jurisdictional legal techniques and trans-jurisdictional social phenomena. The contributors bring a range of disciplinary expertises including anthropology, economics, law and sociology to bear on key questions raised by transnational legal processes. The pieces explore legal developments in multiple territories including Africa, Asia, Latin America and the United States. The volume is designed as a general reader for courses on law and globalisation and related studies. The collection is made up of four parts, each addressing a central theme in transnational law and legal action (law-making and compliance), human rights, commerce and governance. The essays discuss such diverse problems as: the role of foreign actors in the ethnic conflicts of Kosovo and Rwanda; the power the United States and the UK wield over international capital markets; and the adaptability of existing public international law to deal with the challenges wrought by globalisation.

There is a growing clamour - particularly from the main beneficiaries of globalization - that rules need to be established to govern the international economy, with a specific focus on questions such as copyright violations, trade sanctions and protections for foreign investment. Those who perceive they are disadvantaged by globalization demand other legal protections in relation to employment, cultural traditions and the environment.

The diversity of author backgrounds, coupled an assortment of provocative insights, makes this book a useful tool for delving into the meat of globalization, providing a succinct but authoritative overview of the underpinnings necessary to appreciate the who, what, where, and when of globalization. American Society of International Law This is a fascinating and insightful set of essays, the relevance of which has only increased with the financial and economic crisis. The ideas and basic positions of the authors range wide, but that is exactly what we require as we struggle to understand twenty-first century globalisation and what to do about it. I should like to see it in the hands of all academics and policy-makers working on global affairs. Alan Winters, University of Sussex, Chief Economist, UK Department for International Development and Former Head of Research, the World Bank This inter-disciplinary volume focuses on the economic and legal challenges confronting globalisation and the evolution of the global system. The Law and Economics of Globalisation discusses the hotly debated topic of globalisation from a wide set of perspectives of law, economics and international political economy. The authors shed new light on the legal, economic and institutional issues raised by globalisation, extending into areas previously considered as national issues. They discuss how the development of the norms, institutions and reach of the global system will be influenced by the domestic and international concerns arising from the increasing integration of countries in the new century. With contributions from lawyers, economists and other experts in the field, this book will be welcomed by academics, students, researchers, and policymakers who are interested in a comprehensive volume on economic globalisation. It will also appeal to a wider audience, such as executive education courses, as well as business and law schools.

Demonstrating the crucial role that private international law and legality has played and continues to play in shaping globalization, this book argues that the rules, institutions, and actors that make up the practice of private international law have been critical in translating political and economic power into legal regimes that have facilitated the processes of globalization. These processes depend on two fundamental types of socio-political action – the legal structuring of emerging transnational spaces and flows of goods, capital, and finance, and the legal-political reconfiguration of state power and priorities to facilitate the growth of these spaces and their penetration into national political-economic-and social spaces. While a variety of processes were involved in these forms of action, the material practices of private international law played a central role in this project of political economic reconstruction. Offering a theory of private international legality as a practice that intersects with and provides a vehicle for the mobilization of political and economic power, this book examines the construction and enrolment of private law expertise and the structural condition of pluralism in the global political economy to argue that private international law has helped construct a global political economy responsive to the priorities of powerful actors and resistant to the demands and interests of the rest of the world’s populations. It will be of interest to academics and students exploring the relationship between law, international political economy and the nature of state power.

Exploring in depth the institutions that underpin the global economy, this study provides invaluable insights into why a minimum economic order has endured for so long and why states are unwilling to establish a maximum order, a global safety net for all. The author investigates how debt – a critical component of states’ economic infrastructure – leads to debilitating crises, and how these crises undermine the economic autonomy and political independence of states.