The Changing Landscape of Global Financial Governance and the Role of Soft Law provides interdisciplinary perspectives on the changing landscape of global financial governance by exploring the impact and role of soft law, directly or as a precursor of hard law, pertaining to financial governance. Since the shaping of financial governance impacts national, regional and global levels of regulation, different views and arguments contribute to the ongoing discussions about financial regulation. Against this background, this book brings together perspectives of economists and lawyers who have not rallied to one or the other popular call for more regulation as a panacea for the prevention of future global financial crises, calls which have all but drowned out more nuanced scientific debates. Instead, their analysis of aspects of remedial regulatory policy prescriptions already made or proposed demonstrates that carefully designed soft law can be deployed as a valuable method or tool of mediation between the unrestrained autonomy of dysfunctional markets and overzealously crafted hard law.

This monograph examines and analyses the phenomenon of non-binding instruments (also known as 'soft law') in the law of armed conflict, or international humanitarian law. It covers the benefits and drawbacks for States and non-States actors as well as their effectiveness and development in the context of armed conflict.

Global Finance in the 21st Century: Stability and Sustainability in a Fragmenting World explains finance and its regulation after the global financial crisis. The book introduces non-finance scholars into the wider debate regarding the conduct and regulation of finance to encourage broader discussion on important societal issues that relate to finance. The book also explores the ineffectiveness of the current approach to global prudential governance and places this discussion within the more expansive context of global governance and nationalism in the twenty-first century. The book argues that fragmentation and the growing trend of promoting informality and voluntarism has facilitated a return to nationalism as a primary form of global governance that acts contrary to post-crisis reforms that seek to promote stability and sustainability in the conduct of finance. As a remedy, Kourabas suggests that we need more, not less, of what we have traditionally conceived as international law – treaties and treaty-based international organisations. In the field of finance, this means not only pursuing financial liberalisation through free trade and investment treaties, but also the inclusion of provisions in these treaties that promotes systemic financial stability and sustainable development objectives. Of interest to legal and non-legal academics and students, legal professionals and policy-makers, this book offers a nuanced defence of international law as an approach to global governance in finance and beyond, as well as reform of international law to meet the needs of twenty-first century society.

Legal Sources in Business and Human Rights takes stock of different aspects of Business and Human Rights practice in order to identify and explore some dynamics that are driving the evolution of the legal sources of international and EU law in the field of B&HRs.

Over the past two decades Global Legal Pluralism has become one of the leading analytical frameworks for understanding and conceptualizing law in the 21st century. Wherever one looks, there is conflict among multiple legal regimes. Some of these regimes are state-based, some are built and maintained by non-state actors, some fall within the purview of local authorities and jurisdictional entities, and some involve international courts, tribunals, and arbitral bodies, and regulatory organizations. Global Legal Pluralism has provided, first and foremost, a set of useful analytical tools for describing this conflict among legal and quasi-legal systems. At the same time, some pluralists have also ventured in a more normative direction, suggesting that legal systems might sometimes purposely create legal procedures, institutions, and practices that encourage interaction among multiple communities. These scholars argue that pluralist approaches can help foster more shared participation in the practices of law, more dialogue across difference, and more respect for diversity without requiring assimilation and uniformity. Despite the veritable explosion of scholarly work on legal pluralism, conflicts of law, soft law, global constitutionalism, the relationships among relative authorities, transnational migration, and the fragmentation and reinforcement of territorial boundaries, no single work has sought to bring together these various scholarly strands, place them into dialogue with each other, or connect them with the foundational legal pluralism research produced by historians, anthropologists, and political theorists. Paul Schiff Berman, one of the world's leading theorists of Global Legal Pluralism, has gathered over 40 diverse authors from multiple countries and multiple scholarly disciplines to touch on nearly every area of legal pluralism research, offering defenses, critiques, and applications of legal pluralism to 21st-century legal analysis. Berman also provides introductions to every part of the book, helping to frame the various approaches and perspectives. The result is the first comprehensive review of Global Legal Pluralism scholarship ever produced. This book will be a must-have for scholars and students seeking to understand the insights of legal pluralism to contemporary debates about law. At the same time, this volume will help energize and engage the field of Global Legal Pluralism and push this scholarly trajectory forward into another two decades of innovation.

In recent years transnational private regulators have emerged and multiplied. In this book, experts from various academic disciplines offer empirically grounded case studies and theoretical insights into the evolution and resilience of these bodies through crises. Transnational private regulators display considerable flexibility if compared to public institutions both in exercising their rule-making functions and adapting and transforming in light of endogenous or exogenous crises events calling for change. The contributors identify such events and reflect on their impact on transnational private rule-makers. This edited volume covers important areas of global production and finance that are associated with private rule-making and delves into procedural, substantive and practical elements of private rule-making processes. At a policy level, the book provides comparisons among practices of private bodies in various areas, allowing for important lessons to be drawn for all public and private stakeholders active in, or affected by, private and public rule-making. This title is Open Access.

This book investigates the strategic use of public procurement as a way to establish “buying green” as a common practice – not only in the EU, but all over the world. However, imposing environmental requirements may affect the conditions of competition between suppliers, especially between local and foreign ones. This is particularly relevant for signatory states to the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA), a plurilateral WTO agreement that aims at liberalizing public procurement markets. So how can these countries strike a balance between trade concerns and using the environmental potential of public procurement? What scope does the GPA 2012 leave for environmental criteria and how are signatory states making use of it? The need for answers to these questions is becoming even more pressing with the increasing use of green public procurement (GPP). This book discusses approaches to finding legal solutions to this question, using a multilayered approach to do so: In a first step, an analysis of the pertinent GPA provisions serves to delineate the scope for GPP under WTO law. In a second step, an evaluation of the implementation of the respective provision at the regional and national level by the EU and Switzerland helps reveal the impact of the GPA on its signatory states. While the book chiefly focuses on the legal framework for GPP, it also takes into account the latest developments in jurisprudence and policy initiatives. It concludes by proposing practical solutions regarding the specific design of GPP policies and measures in compliance with the GPA. The comparative approach applied in the book, focusing on the implementation of the WTO/GPA by two selected signatories, makes it an informative and insightful resource for practitioners, policymakers and legal scholars from all GPA signatory countries, extending its relevance beyond the selected examples (the EU and Switzerland).