Transnational Law

This casebook analyzes legal questions arising from the tensions between global capitalism and national sovereignty. Today, these tensions are manifest across all spheres of law — national and international, as well as new forms of private ordering. We focus on the areas of trade, the environment, labor, human rights, corporate social responsibility, and separation of powers, especially executive power.

The book will be useful to students, scholars, and practitioners. It provides reviews of debates currently shaping the field, as well as extensive notes and references. It is distinctive in that each chapter offers critical and activist perspectives as well as those of the relevant courts or other legal institutions, both to remind readers that law and markets are indelibly interconnected, and that the character of those interconnections is not a given. Further, this is an interdisciplinary account, putting legal analysis in dialogue especially with anthropological studies of law, among other literatures.

Transnational Law is arranged in three parts. Part I ("Governance through treaties and agreements") considers situations in which states act as parties in treaties and multinational agreements on trade and the environment. Part II ("Governance through codes and contracts") takes up outsourcing, privatization, and corporate social responsibility as situations in which corporate self-regulation confronts core governmental functions and human rights issues. Part III ("Governance through government") considers the implications of transnational law for contemporary debates over separation of powers, culminating in a discussion of what we call the transnational executive.