Unity And Pluralism In Public International Law

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.

'Fragmentation' has become a defining, albeit controversial, metaphor of international law scholarship in the era of globalisation. Some scholars see it as a new development, others as history repeating itself; some approach it as a technical issue and some as the reflection of deeper political struggles. But there is near-consensus about the fact that the established vision of international law as a unitary whole is under threat. At the core of the fragmentation debate lies the concept of unity, but this is hardly ever rationalised and is more assumed than explained. Its meaning remains vague and intuitive. 'The Concept of Unity in Public International Law' attempts to dispel that vagueness by exploring the various possible meanings of the concept of unity in international law. However, eschewing one grand theory of unity, it identifies and compares five candidates. Intentionally pluralistic in its outlook, the book does not engage in normative arguments about whether international law is or should be unitary but seeks to show instead that the concept of unity is contested and that discourses on fragmentation are necessarily contingent. The thesis on which the book is based won the 2009 Prize for best doctoral thesis from the Association des professeurs de droit du Québec.

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.

Many assume incorrectly that confrontations between baseball's players and management began in the 1960s when the Major League Baseball Players Association started showing signs of becoming a union to be reckoned with. (The tensions of the 1960s prompted the owners to form the Player Relations Committee to deal with them and in February 1968, the two groups negotiated the game's first Basic Agreement.) The struggles between players and management to gain the upper hand did not, however, start there--the two groups have had numerous clashes since baseball began (as well as since the 1968 agreement). There have been various periods of conflict and peace throughout the century and before. This work traces the history of the relationship between players and management from baseball's early years to the new challenges and developing tensions that led to spring training lockouts instigated by the owners and to player strikes in 1972, 1981, 1985, and 1994. An important agreement in 1996 brought labor peace once again. The future of player-management relations is also covered.

This book discusses the above-mentioned topics from a multidisciplinary perspective.

The book explores the main characteristics of contemporary theory in international law. It examines in an analytical fashion 32 schools, movements, and trends as well as the works of more than 500 authors on substantive issues of international law.

The way in which 'legal' culture has been defined in the past has limited comparative processes to law itself. The author proposes a new term, 'juriculture', defined as 'the axiological and behavioural formula which pertains to the law.' This new definition provides a comparative tool which focuses on ontological and epistemological bases of law and concomitant legal theories which are distilled from these philosophical bases, in addition to primary and secondary rules, and written laws. This book tackles the crucial issue of how divergent individual, State, and Regional cultures impact the international legal system in the law and State practice vis-à-vis treaty interpretation and reservations. An empirical analysis of cases in the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal and six human rights' treaties demonstrate that beyond weak juricultural pluralism, which the international legal system provides for, there is also strong juricultural pluralism, which is not envisaged by the system. This highlights the tension between universality and diversity in both primary and secondary rules, and international law itself. This book is a must for those interested in human rights, treaty law, culture, and legal theory.

How should the state face the challenge of radical pluralism? How can constitutional orders be changed when they prove unable to regulate society? Santi Romano, Carl Schmitt, and Costantino Mortati, the leading figures of Continental legal institutionalism, provided three responses that deserve our full attention today. Mariano Croce and Marco Goldoni introduce and analyze these three towering figures for a modern audience. Romano thought pluralism to be an inherent feature of legality and envisaged a far-reaching reform of the state for it to be a platform of negotiation between autonomous normative regimes. Schmitt believed pluralism to be a dangerous deviation that should be curbed through the juridical exclusion of alternative institutional formations. Mortati held an idea of the constitution as the outcome of a basic agreement among hegemonic forces that should shape a shared form of life. The Legacy of Pluralism explores the convergences and divergences of these towering jurists to take stock of their ground-breaking analyses of the origin of the legal order and to show how they can help us cope with the current crisis of national constitutional systems.