[
Paul Schiff Berman is Dean and Robert Kramer Research Professor at George Washington University Law School.]
I want to thank all the participants in this online symposium both for their extraordinarily thoughtful comments on my book and for their many constructive interventions through the years as I have been developing these ideas. I am blessed to be part of a truly supportive academic community, and these posts exemplify all that can be good about thoughtful academic discourse built on dialogue rather than one-upsmanship. Such fruitful academic discourse should not be so rare, but that only means we must be especially grateful when true community is instantiated before our eyes.
As to the individual comments, I won’t respond to all of them. Certainly, there are many aspects of our plural world that I wish were better reflected in the book. As
Janet Levit points out, I do not have nearly enough examples from the world of non-state law-making (mostly because they are more difficult to find and document). Likewise,
Jeff Dunoff is surely right that regime interaction is an area that deserves greater attention than I paid to it (and his work usefully provides such attention). The same is true of the international financial regulation described by
David Zaring. Finally,
Peter Spiro correctly identifies the difficulties inherent in deciding when a community is well-enough defined to justify recognition. All of these are matters that further work will need to flesh out.
So, here let me confine my remarks to three quick responses and one small quibble.
