Berman Book Symposium: Closing Post by Dean Paul Schiff Berman

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.

Berman Book Discussion: Berman Agonistes

[Jeffrey Dunoff holds the Laura H. Carnell Chair at Temple University Law School] 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. Paul Berman has produced a terrific, and terrifically ambitious, work of scholarship.  The book presents a compelling case that the current legal order is marked by multiple and overlapping international, transnational, national, sub-national and non-state normative orders.  Paul argues that relations among these various orders should be managed through a “cosmopolitan pluralist” approach that pays due respect to the interests that various norm-generating communities have in any particular dispute.  The text’s central jurisprudential and normative claim is that cosmopolitan pluralism is superior to its two main rivals, namely (i) universalist approaches that elide important normative differences among diverse communities, and (ii) territorially-based sovereigntist approaches that inappropriately privilege the interests of one community by ignoring the legitimate interests of others. Although the “pluralist” strand of Paul’s argument promises to decenter the state as law-maker, ironically virtually all of the book’s examples of legal hybridity feature conflicts involving state law, such as competing claims for authority between two or more states (should the IP law of states A or B should govern the registration of internet domain names); between domestic and international institutions (such as the ICJ and US Supreme Court decisions in the Avena/Medellin line of cases); and between public and private actors (such as when religious and state law diverge on family law matters). Perhaps as a result, GLP devotes very limited attention to analysis of “conflicts” between and among different functional international legal regimes, even though this issue has preoccupied public international lawyers for the better part of a decade (see here and here).  While Paul graciously cites to my work on regime interaction in his discussion of this phenomena (pp. 182-86), I wonder if GLP’s brief analysis does justice to this form of legal hybridity.

Berman Book Discussion: Paul Berman on Global Legal Pluralism

[Paul Schiff Berman is Dean and Robert Kramer Research Professor at George Washington University Law School.] Thanks to Peter and all the other bloggers for providing an opportunity to explore the ideas in my recent book, Global Legal Pluralism. I start from the premise that we live in a world of legal pluralism, where a single act or actor is potentially regulated...