Transnational Legal Orders

Abstract

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).

Measuring multi‐level regulatory governance: Organizational proliferation, coordination, and concentration of influence

“…; Eberlein et al . ; Halliday & Shaffer ). However, these works have not developed the measurement tools and indices required for systematic comparative research across institutional settings.…”

Varieties of Recursivity in Transnational Governance

“…They view domestic legal change as driven by the responses of those subject to the law to broad and indeterminate legal norms formally enacted by state actors: responses to formal law trigger legal reforms which in turn generate new responses. In a more recent contribution, Halliday and Shaffer (2015) examine recursivity in the context of transnational legal orders where norms are produced in a recognizable legal form by or in conjunction with private actors. In times of globalization, Halliday and Carruthers argue, legal change may be influenced by global norm setting by influential global players, such as international organizations, powerful states and clubs of nations.…”

“…1 The fact that voluntary rules become collectively binding raises a question of legitimacy, broadly defined as the acceptance of rules by their addressees and other actors as relevant, appropriate and beneficial. Another body of transnational governance literature focuses on the role of addressees and other stakeholders in the continuous revision of regulation, driven by a mismatch between transnational rules and the context in which they are implemented (Botzem and Dobusch, 2012;Halliday andCarruthers, 2007, 2009;Halliday and Shaffer, 2015). Participation by rule addressees, affected parties and broader publics who have a stake in transnational rulemaking is recognized as one of the core strategies to generate legitimacy.…”

The interactive dynamics of transnational business governance: A challenge for transnational legal theory

“…Shaffer and Halliday theorize transnational legal ordering as a dynamic, recursive process of interaction among transnational and national law, characterized by mutual influences, temporary and contingent settlements, and periodic destabilizations triggering further recursive cycles. 180 Experimentalist governance involves recursive interactions between central and local regulating units. 181 Doorey's open systems theory integrates change within its processual model of inputs, outputs and feedback loops.…”

“…71 Halliday and Shaffer contend that the boundaries between interacting legal orders are fixed by discourses, ideological frames, subjective perceptions, alliances and conflicts. 72 These elements are contestable and hard to measure, however. The fuzzy, permeable and contingent character of interacting entities can raise difficult issues of individuation, since 'interaction is often more like that between waves or clouds or rivulets than between hard, stable entities like rocks or billiard balls'.…”