International law is fragmented and complex, and at the same time increasingly capable of shaping reality in areas as diverse as human rights, trade and investment, and environmental law. The increased influences of international law and its growing institutionalization and judicialization invites reconsideration of the question how should the authority to make and interpret international law be allocated among states, international organizations and tribunals, or in other words, "who should decide what" in a system that formally lacks a central authority? This is not only a juridical question, but one that lies at the very heart of the political legitimacy of international law as a system of governance, defining the relationship between those who create the law and those who are governed by it in a globalizing world. In this book, leading international legal scholars address a broad range of theoretical and practical aspects of the question of allocation of authority in international law and debate the feasibility of three alternative paradigms for international organization: Sovereignty, Supremacy and Subsidiarity. The various contributions transcend technical solutions to what is in essence a problem of international constitutional dimensions. They deal, inter alia, with the structure of the international legal system and the tenacity of sovereignty as one of its foundations, assess the role of supremacy in inter-judicial relations, and draw lessons from the experience of the European Union in applying the principle of subsidiarity. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners of international law alike.

Set in the context of growing interdisciplinarity in legal research, The Political Economy of International Law: A European Perspective provides a much-needed systematic and coherent review of the interactions between Political Economy and International Law. The book reflects the need felt by international lawyers to open their traditional frontiers to insights from other disciplines - and political economy in particular. The methodological approach of the book is to take the traditional list of topics for a general treatise of international law, and to systematically incorporate insights from political economy to each.

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.

Recent decades have witnessed an impressive process of normative development in international law. Numerous new treaties have been concluded, at global and regional levels, establishing far-reaching international legal and regulatory regimes in important areas such as human rights, international trade, environmental protection, criminal law, intellectual property, and more. New political and judicial institutions have been established to develop, apply and adjudicate these rules. This trend has been accompanied by the growing consolidation of treaty norms into international custom, and increased references to international law in domestic settings. As a result of these developments, international relations have now reached an unprecedented level of normative density and intensity, but they have also given rise to the phenomenon of 'fragmentation'. The debate over the fragmentation of international law has largely focused on conflicts: conflicts of norms and conflicts of authority. However, the same developments that have given rise to greater conflict and contradiction in international law, have also produced a growing amount of normative equivalence between rules in different fields of international law. New treaty rules often echo existing international customary norms. Regional arrangements reinforce undertakings that already exist at the global level; and common concerns and solutions appear in many international legal fields. This book focuses on such instances of normative parallelism, developing the concept of 'multisourced equivalent norms' in international law, with contributions by leading international law experts exploring the legal and political implications of the concept in a variety of contexts that span the full spectrum of international legal norms and institutions. By concentrating on situations governed by a multitude of similar norms, the book emphasizes the importance of legal contexts and institutional settings to international law-interpretation and application.

Modern international law is widely understood as an autonomous system of binding legal rules. Nevertheless, this claim to autonomy is far from uncontroversial. International lawyers have faced recurrent scepticism as to both the reality and efficacy of the object of their study and practice. For the most part, this scepticism has focussed on international law's peculiar institutional structure, with the absence of centralised organs of legislation, adjudication and enforcement, leaving international legal rules seemingly indeterminate in the conduct of international politics. Perception of this 'institutional problem' has therefore given rise to a certain disciplinary angst or self-defensiveness, fuelling a need to seek out functional analogues or substitutes for the kind of institutional roles deemed intrinsic to a functioning legal system. The author of this book believes that this strategy of accommodation is, however, deeply problematic. It fails to fully grasp the importance of international law's decentralised institutional form in securing some measure of accountability in international relations. It thus misleads through functional analogy and, in doing so, potentially exacerbates legitimacy deficits. There are enough conceptual weaknesses and blindspots in the legal-theoretical models against which international law is so frequently challenged to show that the perceived problem arises more in theory, than in practice.

Is the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlement system (DSS) effective? How exactly is the effectiveness of this adjudicative system to be defined and measured? Is its effectiveness all about compliance? If not, what goals, beyond compliance, is the WTO DSS expected to achieve? Has it fulfilled these objectives so far, and how can their achievement and the system's effectiveness be enhanced in the future? Building on a theoretical model derived from the social sciences, this book lays down the analytical framework required to answer these questions, while crafting a revealing insider's account of the WTO DSS-one of the most important and debated sites of the evolving international judiciary. Drawing on interviews with WTO adjudicators, WTO Secretariat staff, ambassadors, trade delegates, and trade lawyers, the book offers an elaborate analysis of the various goals steering the DSS's work, the diverse roles it plays, the challenges it confronts, and the outcomes it produces. Through this insider look at the WTO DSS and detailed examination of landmark trade disputes, the book uncovers the oft-hidden dynamics of WTO adjudication and provides fresh perspective on the DSS's operation and the undercurrents affecting its effectiveness. Given the pivotal role the WTO DSS has assumed in the multilateral trading regime since its inception in 1995 and the systemic pressures it has recently come to face, this book makes an important contribution towards understanding and measuring the benefits (as well as the costs) this adjudicative body generates, while providing valuable insights into current debates on its reform.

The current system of international law is experiencing profound transformations. Indeed, the simultaneous processes of globalization combined with the disintegration of international systems of governance and law-making pose complex challenges for legal scholarship. The doctrinal response to these challenges has been theorized within two seemingly contradictory discourses in international law: fragmentation and constitutionalisation. This book takes an innovative approach to international law, viewing the processes of the fragmentation and constitutionalisation as being profoundly interconnected and reflective of each other. It brings together a select group of contributors, including both established and emerging scholars and practitioners, in order to explore the ways in which the problems of fragmentation and constitutionalisation are viscerally linked one to the other and thus mutually conditioning and stimulating. The book considers the theory and practice of international law looking at the two phenomena in relation to the various fields of international law such as international criminal law, cultural heritage law and international environmental law.

This book contains the work of the United Nations International Law Commission (ILC) during the period 1999-2009, brining up to date the three-volume series on the work of the Commission edited by Sir Arthur Watts. Each text is accompanied by an introduction, a concise description of the negotiation process and a carefully selected bibliography.

Explains that international law is not a monolith but can encompass on-going contestation, in which states set forth competing interpretations Maps and explains the cross-country differences in international legal norms in various fields of international law and their application and interpretation in different geographic regions Organized into three broad thematic sections of conceptual matters, domestic institutions and comparative international law, and comparing approaches across issue-areas Chapters authored by contributors who include top international law and comparative law scholars all from diverse backgrounds, experience, and perspectives.

In Interaction and Delimitation of International Legal Orders, the author describes how actions of international dispute settlement bodies set up within institutionalized treaty regimes contribute to the establishment of autonomous international legal orders. Based on examples from the WTO, the EU, the law of the sea and international environmental law, the book presents a typology of uses of legal norms and principles that are extrinsic in the sense that they derive not from the regime, but from general public international law, other treaty regimes, or the jurisprudence from courts operating in other fields. The investigation contradicts assertions that international courts will contribute to systemic integration and offers reflections on repercussions for the legitimacy of international norms and institutions.