This innovative textbook introduces the idea of law existing, operating, and functioning beyond the Nation State. Offering a structured approach, Elaine Fahey breaks down the core aspects of theory, practice and regulation in order to examine the key conceptual and factual components of the relationship between law and global governance.

This book explores whether the co-existence of (partially) overlapping and sometimes competing layers of authority, which characterizes today's global order, undermines or rather strengthens efforts to promote the rule of law on a global scale. Heupel and Reinold argue that whether multi-level governance and global legal pluralism have beneficial or detrimental effects on the international rule of law depends on specific scope conditions. Among these are the mobilization of powerful states and courts, as well as the fit between soft law and hard law arrangements. The volume comprises seven case studies written by International Relations and International Law scholars. Bridging the gap between political science and legal scholarship, the volume enables an interdisciplinary perspective on the emergence of an international rule of law. It also provides much needed empirical research on the implications of multi-level governance and global legal pluralism for the rule of law beyond the nation state.

International Relations and International Law have developed in parallel but distinctly throughout the 20th Century. However in recent years there has been recognition that their shared concerns in areas as diverse as the environment, transnational crime and terrorism, human rights and conflict resolution outweigh their disciplinary and methodological divergences. This concise and accessible volume focuses on collaborative work within the disciplines of international law and international relations, and highlights the need to develop this collaboration further, describing the value for individuals, states, IGOs, and other non-state actors in being able to draw on the cross-pollination of international relations and international legal scholarship. This book: examines how different elements of governance are interacting and shifting from one actor to another analyses the cumulative effect of these shifts, and evaluates how they both enhance and challenge the worlds governing capacity considers how the characteristics of an architecture for a globalized governance are emerging. Helping readers to examine and understand how accumulated actions over time have given rise to system-wide changes, this work is essential reading for all students of international law, international relations and global governance.

Also available as an e-book The book argues that the decision-making processes within international organizations and other global governance bodies ought to be subjected to procedural and substantive legal constraints that are associated domestically with the requirements of the rule of law. The book explains why law — international, regional, domestic, formal or soft — should restrain global actors in the same way that judicial oversight is applied to domestic administrative agencies. It outlines the emerging web of global norms designed to protect the rights and interests of all affected individuals, to enable public deliberation, and to promote the legitimacy of the global bodies. These norms are being shaped by a growing convergence of expectations of global institutions to ensure public participation and representation, impartiality and independence of decision-makers, and accountability of decisions. The book explores these mechanisms as well as the political and social forces that are shaping their development by analysing the emerging judicial practice concerning a variety of institutions, ranging from the UN Security Council and other formal organizations to informal and private standard-setting bodies.

This book conducts an examination of the international legal regime of the continental shelf through the lens of international relations (IR), with a primary focus on global governance theory. Presenting a new perspective within the field of IR and international law, the book offers new insights into the rules, principles, practices, and actors that establish and govern social interactions and the management of common affairs at the transnational level. The governance framework within the continental shelf can encompass a wider scope than legal laws alone, incorporating informal rules or potentially disregarding formal “black letter” rules that may not be effectively applied in practice. To exemplify how governance theory and other IR theories contribute to the analysis of the legal regime concerning the continental shelf, the book conducts an in-depth examination of three significant issues: (i) the demarcation and delimitation of the continental shelf, (ii) the rights and obligations of coastal States in the continental shelf, and (iii) procedural matters related to the continental shelf and international maritime adjudication. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the field of the law of the sea, international law, global governance, and international relations.

Contemporary debates about the changing nature of law engage theories of legal pluralism, political economy, social systems, international relations (or regime theory), global constitutionalism, and public international law. Such debates reveal a variety of emerging responses to distributional issues which arise beyond the Western welfare state and new conceptions of private transnational authority. However, private international law tends to stand aloof, claiming process-based neutrality or the apolitical nature of private law technique and refusing to recognize frontiers beyond than those of the nation-state. As a result, the discipline is paradoxically ill-equipped to deal with the most significant cross-border legal difficulties - from immigration to private financial regulation - which might have been expected to fall within its remit. Contributing little to the governance of transnational non-state power, it is largely complicit in its unhampered expansion. This is all the more a paradox given that the new thinking from other fields which seek to fill the void - theories of legal pluralism, peer networks, transnational substantive rules, privatized dispute resolution, and regime collision - have long been part of the daily fare of the conflict of laws. The crucial issue now is whether private international law can, or indeed should, survive as a discipline. This volume lays the foundations for a critical approach to private international law in the global era. While the governance of global issues such as health, climate, and finance clearly implicates the law, and particularly international law, its private law dimension is generally invisible. This book develops the idea that the liberal divide between public and private international law has enabled the unregulated expansion of transnational private power in these various fields. It explores the potential of private international law to reassert a significant governance function in respect of new forms of authority beyond the state. To do so, it must shed a number of assumptions entrenched in the culture of the nation-state, but this will permit the discipline to expand its potential to confront major issues in global governance.

This book explores the methods through which international law and its associated innovative global governance mechanisms can strengthen, foster and scale up the impacts of treaty regimes and international law on the ability to implement global governance mechanisms. Examining these questions through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the book looks at environmental, social and economic treaty regimes. It analyses legal methodologies as well as comparative methods of assessing the relationship between the SDGs and treaty regimes and international law. Contradictions exist between international treaty regimes and principles of international law resulting in conflicting implementation of the treaty regimes and of global governance mechanisms. Without determining these areas of contest and highlighting their detrimental impacts, the SDGs and other efforts at global governance cannot maximize their legal and societal benefits. The book concludes by suggesting a path forward for the SDGs and for international treaty regimes that is forged in a solid understanding and application of the advantages of global governance mechanisms, including reflections from the COVID-19 pandemic experience. Addressing the strengths, gaps and weaknesses related to treaty regimes and global governance mechanisms, the book provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of this increasingly important topic. It will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in sustainability and law.

This book offers a stimulating introduction to the links between areas of global governance, human rights global economy and international law. By drawing on a range of diverse subject areas, Errol P. Mendes argues that the foundations of global governance, human rights and international law are undermined by a conflict or ‘tragic flaw’, where insistence on absolute conceptions of state sovereignty are pitted against universally accepted principles of justice and human rights resulting in destructive self-interest for both the state and the global community. The book explores how human rights and international law are applied in some of the critical institutions of global governance and in the operations of the global private sector, and how States, institutions and global civil society struggle to fight this ‘tragic flaw’. The book is brought up to date by considering developments in the role of the IMF, the World Bank, bilateral investment treaties; the likely failure of the Doha round of WTO negotiations; the legacy of the 2008 financial crisis; and the role of the International Criminal Court and the evolving Responsibility to Protect doctrine in international peace and security crises in the Middle East, Central and West Africa among other regions of the world. With its intensely interdisciplinary approach, this book motivates new thinking in the realm of global governance and international law, and promotes the development of new strategies for negotiating between conflicting leadership and organisational values within global institutions. The book will be of great interest and use to students and researchers of public international law, international relations and political science, business and human rights, global governance and international trade and economic law.

A theme of growing importance in both the law and philosophy and socio-legal literature is how regulatory dynamics can be identified (that is, conceptualised and operationalised) and normative expectations met in an age when transnational actors operate on a global plane and in increasingly fragmented and transformative contexts. A reconsideration of established theories and axiomatic findings on regulatory phenomena is an essential part of this discourse. There is indeed an urgent need for discontinuity regarding what we (think we) know about, among other things, law, legality, sovereignty and political legitimacy, power relations, institutional design and development, and pluralist dynamics of ordering under processes of globalisation and transnationalism. Making an important contribution to the scholarly debate on the subject, this volume features original and much-needed essays of theoretical and applied legal philosophy as well as socio-legal accounts that reflect on whether legal positivism has anything to offer to this intellectual enterprise. This is done by discussing whether global and transnational cultural, socio-political, economic, and juridical challenges as well as processes of diversification, fragmentation, and transformation (significantly, de-formalisation) reinforce or weaken legal positivists’ assumptions, claims, and methods. The themes covered include, but are not limited to, absolute and limited state sovereignty; the ‘new international legal positivism’; Hartian legal positivism and the ‘normative positivist’ account; the relationship between modern secularisation, social conventionalism, and meta-ontological issues of temporality in postnational jurisprudence; the social positivisation of human rights; the formation and content of jus cogens norms; feminist critique; the global and transnational migration of principles of justice and morality; the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties rule of interpretation; and the responsibility of transnational corporations.

The relevance and importance of the rule of law to the international legal order cannot be doubted and was recently reaffirmed by the Declaration of the High-level Meeting of the General Assembly on the Rule of Law at the National and International Level's solemn commitment to it on behalf of states and international organizations. In this edited collection, leading scholars and practitioners from the fields of global governance, resources, investment and trade examine how the commitment to the rule of law manifests itself in the respective fields. The book looks at cutting-edge issues within each field and examines the questions arising from the interplay between them. With a clear three-part structure, it explores each area in detail and addresses contemporary challenges while trying to assure a commitment to the rule of law. The contributions also consider how the rule of law has been or should be reconceptualised. Taking a multi-disciplinary approach, the book will appeal to international lawyers from across the spectrum, including practitioners in the field of international investment and trade law.