For the past 15 years an enormous enterprise of global norm making and related national lawmaking has been underway in many areas of global commerce. This article shows that leading global institutions, such as the World Bank, IMF, and United Nations, are building an international financial architecture with law-including corporate bankruptcy law-as its foundation. Building on research on international institutions and three national cases (China, Indonesia, Korea), the authors propose a new framework for legal change in a global context-the recursivity of law. They argue that the globalization of bankruptcy law has proceeded through three cycles: (1) at the national level through recursive cycles of lawmaking, (2) at the global level through iterative cycles of norm making, and (3) at the nexus of the two. Recursive cycles are driven by driven by four mechanisms-the indeterminacy of law, contradictions, diagnostic struggles, and actor mismatch. Thus the recursivity of law both revives and expands the sociological theory of legal change and offers a basis for an integrated theory of globalization and law.Sociological studies of globalization largely neglect law. Whereas research has been extensive in such global arenas as finance, business, culture, religion, and population, it has been almost entirely absent for law. This

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This book offers a pathbreaking, empirically grounded theory that reframes the study of law and society. It shifts research from a predominantly national context to one that places transnational, national, and local lawmaking and practice within a single, coherent, analytic frame. By presenting and elaborating a new concept, transnational legal orders, Halliday and Shaffer present an original approach to legal orders that affect fundamental economic and social behaviors. The contributors generate arrays of hypotheses about how transnational legal orders rise and fall, where they compete and cooperate, and how they settle and unsettle. This original theory is applied and developed by distinguished scholars from North America, Europe, and Asia in business law (taxation, corporate bankruptcy, secured transactions, transport of goods by sea), regulatory law (monetary and trade, fi nance, food safety, climate change), and human rights law (civil and political rights, rule of law, right to health/access to medicines, human traffi cking, criminal accountability of political leaders).

This article examines the meanings of politics in everyday legal practice using the case of Chinese criminal defense lawyers. Based on 194 in‐depth interviews with criminal defense lawyers and other informants in 22 cities across China, we argue that lawyers’ everyday politics have two faces: on the one hand, lawyers potentially can challenge state power, protect citizen rights, and pursue proceduralism in their daily work; on the other hand, they often have to rely on political connections with state agencies to protect themselves and to solve problems in their legal practice. The double meanings of politics—namely, political liberalism and political embeddedness—explain the complex motivations and coping tactics that are frequently found in Chinese lawyers’ everyday work. Our data show that the Chinese criminal defense bar is differentiated along these two meanings of politics into five clusters of lawyers: progressive elites, pragmatic brokers, notable activists, grassroots activists, and routine practitioners. They also suggest that a principal manifestation of political lawyering is not merely short‐term mobilization or revolutionary struggle against arbitrary state power, but also an incremental everyday process that often involves sophisticated tactics to manage interests that often conflict.

Globalization of law may be defined as the worldwide progression of transnational legal structures and discourses along the dimensions of extensity, intensity, velocity, and impact. We propose that a theory of the global penetration of law will require at least four elements-actors, mechanisms, power, and structures and arenas. A comparison of four approaches to globalization and law-world polity, world systems, postcolonial globalism, and law and economic development-indicates considerable variation in perceived outcomes and gaps in explanation, but with possible complementarities in both outcomes and explanatory factors. Research demonstrates that globalization is variably contested in several domains of research on law: (a) the construction and regulation of global markets, (b) crimes against humanity and genocide, (c) the diffusion of political liberalism and constitutionalism, and (d) the institutionalization of women's rights. We propose that the farther globalizing legal norms and practices are located from core local cultural institutions and beliefs, the less likely global norms will provoke explicit contestation and confrontation. Future research will be productively directed to where and how global law originates, how and when global norms and law are transmitted and enforced, and how global-local settlements are negotiated. GLOBALIZATION OF LAW 449 initially contextualized definitions, interpretations, diagnoses, frames, archaeologies, genealogies, and extrapolations in accord with the universality inherent in the globalization discourse. An arena may be said to be globalized when there is a coincidence of structural and discursive elements. Variation in the advance of globalization occurs in both structural and discursive elements, which may be arrayed along dimensions of extensity (i.e., breadth of inclusion of nation-states, policy domains within states), intensity (i.e., how deeply a global influence penetrates inside states, societies, and consciousnesses), velocity (i.e., how rapid the flow of a globalizing content), and impact (i.e., the degree of change effected directly or indirectly by a global encounter) (Held et al. 1999). Thus, a highly globalized domain includes structural changes that are fast moving and extensive and that penetrate intensively into a society with strong impact. A highly globalized domain is dominated by discourses that are universalized and that obtain consensus deep within adopter societies.

This review proposes that the recursivity of law offers a promising framework for sociolegal and interdisciplinary research on global norm-making. The recursivity approach is systematic, generates hypotheses and questions about global actors and mechanisms, takes seriously historical contingency, and is inherently comparative across issue areas and different levels of governance. In global lawmaking, recursivity proceeds principally through the intersection of three interacting cycles of global normmaking, national lawmaking, and the interaction between the two. With particular focus on genocide and war crimes, violence against women, trade law, and climate change, the review demonstrates how four mechanisms—actor mismatch, diagnostic struggles, contradictions, and indeterminacy—drive forward these cycles of reform until the inherent tensions within them are resolved and normmaking settles. A sociolegal approach to the recursivity of global normmaking emphasizes (a) the politics of the legal complex, (b) the constitutive power of legal concepts, (c) the structure and dynamics of global regulatory institutions, and (d) the formal properties of global law. The review concludes with generalizations about global normmaking and particularly promising topics for sociolegal scholarship.

The Anti-Money Laundering regime has been important in harmonizing laws and institutions, and has received global political support. Yet there has been minimal effort at evaluation of how well any AML intervention does in achieving its goals. There are no credible estimates either of the total amount laundered (globally or nationally) nor of most of the specific serious harms that AML aims to avert. Consequently, reduction of these is not a plausible outcome measure. There have been few efforts by country evaluators in the FATF Mutual Evaluation Reports (MERs) to acquire qualitative data or seriously analyze either quantitative or qualitative data. We find that data are relatively unimportant in policy development and implementation. Moreover, the long gaps of about 8 years between evaluations mean that widely used 'country risk' models for AML are forced still to rely largely on the 3rd Round evaluations whose use of data was minimal and inconsistent. While the 4th round MERs (2014-2022) have made an effort to be more systematic in the collection and analysis of data, FATF has still not established procedures that provide sufficiently informative evaluations. Our analysis of five recent National Risk Assessments (a major component of the new evaluations) in major countries shows little use of data, though the UK is notably better than the others. In the absence of more consistent and systematic data analysis, claims that countries have less or more effective systems will be open to allegations of ad hoc, impressionistic or politicized judgments. This reduces their perceived legitimacy, though this does not mean that the AML efforts and the evaluation processes themselves have no effects.Crime Law Soc Change (2018) 69:307-328 https://doi

This article employs a new framework for legal change, the recursivity of law, to explain why China's criminal procedure law has cycled through numerous reforms between 1979 and 2008 without improving the conditions of lawyers' criminal defense work. The authors argue that Chinese lawyers' difficulties in criminal defense have deep roots in the recursive nature of the criminal procedure reforms. In particular, those difficulties were produced by interactions of the four mechanisms of recursivity (indeterminacy of law, contradictions, diagnostic struggles, and actor mismatch) in both lawmaking and implementation. The empirical analysis shows that these mechanisms are linked in pairs and in sequence. This logic of change offers an integrated interdisciplinary approach to the enactment and implementation of law in other times, places, and areas of law.