Books

Book Discussion Informal International Lawmaking: Accountability and Domestic Implementation of IN-LAW

[Jan Wouters is Professor of International Law and International Organizations, Jean Monnet Chair Ad Personam EU and Global Governance, and Director of the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies and Institute for International Law at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven).] Once we conclude that IN-LAW is not devoid of impact and cannot be ignored as a normative process, the question...

Book Discussion Informal International Lawmaking: Legality and Normativity – A Reaction to Tai-Heng Cheng

[Ramses Wessel is Professor of the Law of the European Union and other International Organizations at the University of Twente] First of all many thanks to Prof. Tai-Heng Cheng for taking the time to respond so eloquently to the parts on legality and normativity in our book on Informal International Lawmaking. Because of his knowledge of the area (as for instance reflected in...

Book Discussion Informal International Lawmaking: Legality and Normativity

[Tai-Heng Cheng is the international disputes partner of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP in New York.  Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of his firm or its clients.] Congratulations are due to the authors of Informal International Lawmaking, and especially to the editors, Professors Pauwelyn, Wesssel and Wouters, for their keen observations and appraisals of the global decisionmaking...

Book Discussion Informal International Lawmaking: Legal Nature and Impact

[Ramses Wessel is Professor of the Law of the European Union and other International Organizations at the University of Twente] In Part II we focus on the legal nature of informal international lawmaking. Perhaps ironically the question of whether IN-LAW should be perceived as forming part of the ‘legal universe’ is one of the most prominent ones addressed in this book. The...

Book Discussion Informal International Lawmaking: A comment by David Zaring

[David Zaring is Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School] Pauwelyn, Wessel, and Wouter’s excellent book, which in turn marks the fruition of a project on informal international lawmaking that they dub IN-LAW, is pretty good on the theory end of things, which is what this post will look at, and also critique....

Book Discussion Informal International Lawmaking: Conceptual Approaches

[Joost Pauwelyn is Professor of International Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Trade and Economic Integration, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.] The result of a two-year research project (involving over forty scholars and thirty case studies), this edited volume addresses a phenomenon we labeled “informal international lawmaking” or IN-LAW. We chose the word “informal” as it is...

Berman Book Symposium: Closing Post by Dean Paul Schiff Berman

[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. 

Berman Book Symposium: Multiscalar Legal Pluralism and Justice

[Hari M. Osofsky is Associate Professor and 2011 Lampert Fesler Research Fellow, University of Minnesota Law School and Associate Director of Law, Geography & Environment, Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment & the Life Sciences] This post is part of our symposium on Dean Schiff Berman's book Global Legal Pluralism. Other posts can be found in Related Posts below. It is an honor and a pleasure to have the opportunity to participate in this conversation about Paul Berman's exciting new book, "Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence of Law Beyond Borders.”  Like many of the commentators, I have had the privilege of watching this project evolve over several years.  The book is a tremendous contribution which reflects Paul's command of numerous interdisciplinary literatures and substantive areas of law.  It makes an articulate and compelling case for taking a cosmopolitan and pluralist approach to law in an era of globalization. My two primary interventions in this brief blog are not so much critiques of the book, as suggestions for directions Paul and others could go from here to explore these issues in additional ways.  First, as Paul and I have discussed for many years, I think his geographical analysis might be developed further by focusing on issues of scale more deeply.  Early on, I queried whether the book should be called "multiscalar legal pluralism" rather than "global legal pluralism."  I wondered whether Paul could fully capture the interactions and institutional hybridity through focusing on the "global" or "international" levels. Paul has done much to address that concern in the ways in which he has incorporated multiple levels of government, even using the term "multiscalar" in the context of discussing climate change federalism.  However, I would be excited to see him go even deeper in future explorations of scale in this context.  Specifically, I wonder what "global" or "international" means in a cosmopolitan and pluralist world.  To the extent that one accepts geographer Kevin Cox's theory that each level is constituted by core interactions at that level and by interactions across levels (a theory that I often draw from in my own work), multiple visions of the international scale might result.  These possibilities for pluralism in defining global scale might impact the hybrid forms that Paul explores so thoughtfully.

Berman Book Discussion: Beyond the Boundaries of Berman’s Global Legal Pluralism

[Janet K. Levit is Dean and Dean John Rogers Endowed Chair at the University of Tulsa College of Law] This post is part of our symposium on Dean Schiff Berman's book Global Legal Pluralism. Other posts can be found in Related Posts below. In Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence of Law Beyond Borders, Paul Schiff Berman concludes that we live in a world of multiple norm-generating, but not necessarily territorially-based, communities, some sanctioned by the state and some not; these communities overlap in asserting norms and “adjudicating” law, creating hybrid legal spaces that are often “jurisgenerative.”  Berman argues that in an age of globalization, we should embrace this type of pluralism.  To the extent that the book is prescriptive, Berman looks to law, particularly procedural and conflicts law, to preserve and manage these hybrid legal spaces. Since 2005, I have joined Berman in multiple symposia and panels, and I have commented on many of the articles and book chapters that are the building blocks for Global Legal Pluralism.  The long “gestation” period paid off – Global Legal Pluralism is a brilliant and eloquent weaving of Berman’s various scholarly threads.  While the book concludes in part that law is “messy,” the book’s argument is quite neat, tight, and logical.  Berman addresses and redresses the dominant critiques lobbed at his work over the years, showcases agility with interdisciplinary research, and demonstrates the value of legal scholarship that does not end with heavy-handed prescriptions.  Like all books of this breadth, there is room for critique.  Instead, in this post, I offer some broader thoughts on ways to push Berman’s outstanding work beyond its own boundaries and borders.