The Politics Of The Globalization Of Law

How does the globalization of law, the emergence of multiple and shifting venues of legal accountability, enhance or evade the fulfillment of international human rights? Alison Brysk’s edited volume aims to assess the institutional and political factors that determine the influence of the globalization of law on the realization of human rights. The globalization of law has the potential to move the international human rights regime from the generation of norms to the fulfillment of rights, through direct enforcement, reshaping state policy, granting access to civil society, and global governance of transnational forces. In this volume, an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars explores the development of new norms, mechanisms, and practices of international legal accountability for human rights abuse, and tests their power in a series of "hard cases." The studies find that new norms and mechanisms have been surprisingly effective globally, in terms of treaty adherence, international courts, regime change, and even the diffusion of citizenship rights, but this effect is conditioned by regional and domestic structures of influence and access. However, law has a more mixed impact on abuses in Mexico, Israel-Palestine and India. Brysk concludes that the globalization of law is transforming sovereignty and fostering the shift from norms to fulfillment, but that peripheral states and domains often remain beyond the reach of this transformation. Theoretically framed, but comprised of empirical case material, this edited volume will be useful for both graduate students and academics in law, political science, human rights, international relations, global and international studies, and law and society.

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.

This collection of essays explores different dimensions of the relationship between the third world and international law. The topics covered include third world approaches to international law, non-state actors and developing countries, feminism and the third world, foreign investment, resistance and international law, and territorial disputes and native peoples. It is a further contribution to the work done by scholars intent on elaborating what might be termed Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL). This initiative seeks to continue and further develop the important work that has been done over many decades, particularly by scholars and jurists from the third world, to construct an international law which is sensitive to the needs of third world peoples. This body of scholarship has attempted to extend and expand the concerns and materials of international law. The essays in this volume are animated by these same motives at a time when unprecedented issues confront third world peoples, particularly since the contemporary international system appears to be disempowering third world peoples, intensifying inequality between the North and the South, and indeed, importantly, within the North and the South. TWAIL scholars attempt to look afresh at the history of colonial international law, engage previous trends in third world scholarship in international law, take cognizance of the dramatic changes which have characterized the body of international law in the last few decades from the perspective of third world peoples, record their resistance to unjust and oppressive international laws, and advance new approaches that address their needs and concerns. These are the broad themes and concerns which animate this collection of essays.

The question whether and how boundaries might individuate and thereby be constitutive features of any imaginable legal order has yet to be addressed in a systematic and comprehensive manner by legal and political theory. This book seeks to address this important omission, providing an original contribution to the debate about law in a global setting. Against the widely endorsed assumption that we are now moving towards law without boundaries, it argues that every imaginable legal order, global or otherwise, is bounded in space, time, membership, and content. The book is built up around three main insights. Firstly, that legal orders can best be understood as a form of joint action in which authorities mediate and uphold who ought to do what, where, and when with a view to realising the normative point of acting together. Secondly, that behaviour can call into question the boundaries that determine who ought to do what, where and when: a-legality. Thirdly, that this a-legality reveals boundaries as marking a limit and, to a lesser or greater extent, a fault line of the respective legal order. Legal boundaries reveal ways of ordering the who, what, where, and when of behaviour which have been excluded, yet which remain within the range of practical possibilities accessible to the collective: limits. However legal boundaries also intimate an order which exceeds the range of possibilities accessible to that collective - the fault line of the respective legal order. Careful analysis of a wide range of legal orders, including nomadism, Roman law, classical international law, ius gentium, multinationals, cyberlaw, lex mercatoria, the EU, global regimes of human rights, and space law validates this thesis. What sense, then, can we make of the normativity of the law, if there can be no inclusion without exclusion? Arguing that legal and political theories misunderstand how legal boundaries do their work of including and excluding, the book develops a normative theory of legal order which is alternative to both communitarianism and cosmopolitanism.

This book is an unprecedented attempt to analyze the role of the law in the global movement for social justice. Case studies in the book are written by leading scholars from both the global South and the global North, and combine empirical research on the ground with innovative sociolegal theory to shed new light on a wide array of topics. Among the issues examined are the role of law and politics in the World Social Forum; the struggle of the anti-sweatshop movement for the protection of international labour rights; and the challenge to neoliberal globalization and liberal human rights raised by grassroots movements in India and indigenous peoples around the world. These and other cases, the editors argue, signal the emergence of a subaltern cosmopolitan law and politics that calls for new social and legal theories capable of capturing the potential and tensions of counter-hegemonic globalization.

First published in 2011. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Publisher Description

First published in 2011. Lawyers and the Rule of Law in an Era of Globalization focuses on the national and transnational processes transforming both the rule of law and the role of lawyers. The book draws on a framework that emphasizes the relationship between the national the international, the strategies of lawyers at various political levels, and the circulation of ideas and people. As such, it considers the 'rule of law', not as a normative ideal that has to be accomplished and realized, but rather as a field of action and discourse that emerges through complex relationships among experts, national elites and global institutions. Through detailed empirical work, the contributors all examine the relationship between law, politics and the state, focusing on lawyers and the social capital they possess and deploy, in order to understands the efficacy of the rule of law in different polities. This book will be invaluable for socio-legal scholars, students of the legal profession, as well as those with interests in law and development studies.