New Working Paper: "The Structure of Global Law"

For those interested, I have posted the following working paper to the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) website: The Structure of Global Law: Fracture, Fluidity, Permeability, and Polycentricity.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2012))

This working paper continues work on the evolution of  a "law" beyond that of the domestic legal orders of states and the international law frameworks that serve as an expression of state based collective governance. To that extent, it seeks to liberate theory both from the ideological constraints of the state system and as well from the limitations of earlier work in transnational law.  Not that the state is a bad thing, or that its ideology is neither useful nor powerful; merely that state ideology, and the state itself, is no longer the sole or controlling occupant of the center of regulatory or governance power.  To fail to take this into account is to ignore reality in favor of preserving the ideological purity of a world view that passed with the ascendancy of globalization.

The concept of transnational law, as controversial as it remains, is still tied too closely to the ideal of the national, and to the notion of power legitimacy as possible only within the organs of and bounded by the legal structures of the state.  Transnational law still retains too close a connection to the state system, and its ideology, to offer a substantially interesting way of understanding developments in governance in the wake of globalization.  What follows is the abstract and a link to the working paper.  To consider the possibility of law/governance beyond the state it is necessary to avoid attaching its framework either to the state or to law (as traditionally and narrowly understood as a product of the state).

The Structure of Global Law: Fracture, Fluidity, Permeability, and Polycentricity.

Abstract:
Global law can be understood as the systematization of anarchy, as the management of a loosely intertwined universe of autonomous governance frameworks operating dynamically across borders and grounded in functional differentiation among governance communities. Global law is a way of pointing to an emerging universe of systems that share characteristics and whose interactions lend them to organization; it is the as the law of non-state governance systems. The structure of global law can be understood as an amalgamation of four fundamental characteristics that together define a new order in form that is, in some respects, the antithesis of the orderliness and unity of the law-state system it will displace (though not erase). The essay considers the structure of global law in this context, understood as an amalgamation of four fundamental characteristics that together define a new order in form that is, in some respects, the antithesis of the orderliness and unity of the law-state system it will displace (though not erase). These four fundamental characteristics—fracture, fluidity, permeability, and polycentricity—comprise the fundamental structure of global law. Fracture, fluidity, permeability and polycentricity are the basic characteristics of global law, the systematization of which marks its field boundaries. These also serve as the structural foundations of its constitutional element, its substantive element, and its process element. From that systematization one can derive a method of theorizing the emerging framework of the unity of disunity in governance, in which law and governance systems multiply within a discernible internal logic, while the objects of regulation remain constant.

The Working Paper can be downloaded HERE: