Power And Pluralism In International Law

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.

We live in a world of legal pluralism, where a single act or actor is potentially regulated by multiple legal or quasi-legal regimes imposed by state, substate, transnational, supranational and nonstate communities. Navigating these spheres of complex overlapping legal authority is confusing and we cannot expect territorial borders to solve all these problems. At the same time, those hoping to create one universal set of legal rules are also likely to be disappointed by the sheer variety of human communities and interests. Instead, we need an alternative jurisprudence, one that seeks to create or preserve spaces for productive interaction among multiple, overlapping legal systems by developing procedural mechanisms, institutions and practices that aim to manage, without eliminating, the legal pluralism we see around us. Global Legal Pluralism provides a broad synthesis across a variety of legal doctrines and academic disciplines and offers a novel conceptualization of law and globalization.

"Abstract Global legal pluralism has become one of the leading analytical frameworks for understanding and conceptualizing law in the twenty-first century"--

The proliferation of international courts and the extension of international regulation to new areas have been considered to be threatening for the unity of Public International Law as a legal system. These developments are the consequence of the increasing formation of legal subsystems (material international regimes) which continue to grow in complexity. How these trends affect the unity of the international legal system requires theoretical scrutiny of its fundamental bases. This work considers that the unity of the international legal system depends upon its normative structure, and on the social medium in which it is applied: the evolving international community. A unified international legal system has as its ultimate goal the protection of human dignity through the international regulation of human rights. The question of the unifying stability of the international legal system and the development of legal subsystems within it encourages a review of the major issues of current Public International Law, considering the evolution from traditional doctrines to recent approaches. This review is done from an analytical frame that provides a deeper understanding of the current situation of Public International Law as a legal system.

This book addresses conflicts involving different normative orders: what happens when international law prohibits behavior, but the same behavior is nonetheless morally justified or warranted? Can the actor concerned ignore international law under appeal to morality? Can soldiers escape legal liability by pointing to honor? Can accountants do so under reference to professional standards? How, in other words, does law relate to other normative orders? The assumption behind this book is that law no longer automatically claims supremacy, but that actors can pick and choose which code to follow. The novelty resides not so much in identifying conflicts, but in exploring if, when and how different orders can be used intentionally. In doing so, the book covers conflicts between legal orders and conflicts involving law and honor, self-regulation, lex mercatoria, local social practices, bureaucracy, religion, professional standards and morality.

When studying international law there is often a risk of focusing entirely on the content of international rules (i.e. regimes), and ignoring why these regimes exist and to what extent the rules affect state behavior. Similarly, international relations studies can focus so much on theories based on the distribution of power among states that it overlooks the existence and relevance of the rules of international law. Both approaches hold their dangers. The overlooking of international relations risk assuming that states actually follow international law, and discounting the specific rules of international law makes it difficult for readers to understand the impact of the rules in more than a superficial manner. This book unifies international law and international relations by exploring how international law and its institutions may be relevant and influence the course of international relations in international trade, protection of the environment, human rights, international criminal justice and the use of force. As a study on the intersection of power and law, this book will be of great interest and use to scholars and students of international law, international relations, political science, international trade, and conflict resolution.

Horatia Muir Watt and Diego P. Fernández-Arroyo: Introduction: The Relevance of Private International Law to the Global Governance Debate Part I: BEHIND CLOSED DOORS: THE PRIVATE MODEL AND ITS DISCONTENTS Section A. Epistemological Challenge: The Meaning of 'Private' in Private International Law 1: Geoffrey Samuel: Comparative Law as Resistance 2: Robert Wai: Private v Private: Transnational Private Law and Contestation in Global Economic Governance 3: Ralf Michaels: Post-critical Private International Law: From Politics to Technique Section B. Political Critique: Privatization as Homogenization 4: Tomaso Ferrando: Global Land Grabbing: A Tale of Three Legal Homogenizations 5: Veronica Corcodel: Governance Implications of Comparative Legal Thinking: On Henry Maine's Jurisprudence and British Imperialism Section C. Searching for Legitimacy: Questions of Design 6: Diego P. Fernández-Arroyo: Private Adjudication Without Precedent? 7: Gilles Cuniberti: The Merchant Who Would Not Be King: Unreasoned Fears about Private Lawmaking 8: Yannick Radi: Balancing the Public and the Private in International Investment Law PART II: BEYOND THE SCHISM: EMERGING MODELS AND WORLDVIEWS Section A. The Global Turn to Informality: Pragmatism and Constructivism 9: Benoit Frydman: A Pragmatic Approach To Global Law 10: Harm Schepel: Rules of Recognition: A Legal Constructivist Approach to Transnational Private Regulation 11: Michael Karayanni: The Extraterritorial Application of Access to Justice Rights: On the Availability of Israeli Courts to Palestinian Plaintiffs Section B. Re-importing Public Law Methodology: Federalism and Constitutionalism 12: Alex Mills: Variable Geometry, Peer Governance, and the Public International Perspective on Private International Law 13: Jacco Bomhoff: The Constitution of the Conflict of Laws 14: Jérémy Heymann: Importing Proportionality to the Conflict of Laws Section C. Reinventing a Global Horizon: Working towards a Global Public Good 15: Bram van der Eem: Financial Stability and Private International Law 16: Ivana Isailovic: Recognition(and Mis-recognition) in Private International Law 17: Sabine Corneloup: Can Private International Law Contribute to Global Migration Governance? Horatia Muir Watt: Paradigm Change in Private International Law: Renewal, Circularity, or Decline?

This book is a collection of contributions by leading scholars on theoretical and contemporary problems of militant democracy. The term 'militant democracy' was first coined in 1937. In a militant democracy preventive measures are aimed, at least in practice, at restricting people who would openly contest and challenge democratic institutions and fundamental preconditions of democracy like secularism - even though such persons act within the existing limits of, and rely on the rights offered by, democracy. In the shadow of the current wars on terrorism, which can also involve rights restrictions, the overlapping though distinct problem of militant democracy seems to be lost, notwithstanding its importance for emerging and established democracies. This volume will be of particular significance outside the German-speaking world, since the bulk of the relevant literature on militant democracy is in the German language. The book is of interest to academics in the field of law, political studies and constitutionalism.