From International Law to Law and Globalization

TLDR

International law has traditionally focused on state practice, but scholars now recognize that transnational networks, judicial cooperation, and interdisciplinary perspectives are needed to capture the complex cross‑border norm development of the 21st century. The article proposes an interdisciplinary framework—law and globalization—to analyze how legal norms spread beyond state borders. The authors outline four ways law and globalization expands traditional law and identify ten emerging conceptual areas for future research.

Abstract

International law's traditional emphasis on state practice has long been questioned, as scholars have paid increasing attention to other important - though sometimes inchoate - processes of norm development. Yet, the more recent focus on transnational law, governmental and non-governmental networks, and judicial influence and cooperation across borders, while a step in the right direction, still seems insufficient to describe the complexities of in an era of Accordingly, it is becoming clear that international is itself an overly constraining rubric and that we need an expanded framework, one that situates cross-border norm development at the intersection of legal scholarship on comparative law, conflict of laws, civil procedure, cyberlaw, and the cultural analysis of law, as well as traditional law. Moreover, this new scholarship must be truly interdisciplinary, drawing on insights not only of relations theorists, but also of anthropologists, sociologists, critical geographers, and cultural studies scholars. Such insights afford a more nuanced idea of how people actually form affiliations, construct communities, and receive and develop legal norms, often with little regard for the fixed geographical boundaries of the nation-state system. This Article refers to such a broader frame of analysis as law and globalization. Although is, of course, a controversial term, the idea of and globalization nevertheless provides a useful lens for viewing the plural ways in which legal norms are disseminated in the Twenty-first Century. This Article sketches the contours of what it might mean to emphasize and globalization, rather than simply law. It suggests four important ways in which the study of and globalization enlarges the traditional focus of and then identifies ten areas of conceptual inquiry that are already coalescing within the scholarly literature to form the core of a study of and