How is law mobilized and who has the power and authority to construct its meaning? This important volume examines this question as well as how law is constituted and reconfigured through social processes that frame both its continuity and transformation over time. The volume highlights how power is deployed under conditions of legal pluralism, exploring its effects on livelihoods and on social institutions, including the state. Such an approach not only demonstrates how the state, through its various development programs and organizational structures, attempts to control territory and people, but also relates the mechanisms of state control to other legal modes of control and regulation at both local and supranational levels.

This book takes the reader on a sweeping tour of the international legal field to reveal some of the patterns of difference, dominance, and disruption that belie international law's claim to universality. Pulling back the curtain on the "divisible college of international lawyers," Anthea Roberts shows how international lawyers in different states, regions, and geopolitical groupings are often subject to distinct incoming influences and outgoing spheres of influence in ways that reflect and reinforce differences in how they understand and approach international law. These divisions manifest themselves in contemporary controversies, such as debates about Crimea and the South China Sea. Not all approaches to international law are created equal, however. Using case studies and visual representations, the author demonstrates how actors and materials from some states and groups have come to dominate certain transnational flows and forums in ways that make them disproportionately influential in constructing the "international." This point holds true for Western actors, materials, and approaches in general, and for Anglo-American (and sometimes French) ones in particular. However, these patterns are set for disruption. As the world moves past an era of Western dominance and toward greater multipolarity, it is imperative for international lawyers to understand the perspectives and approaches of those coming from diverse backgrounds. By taking readers on a comparative tour of different international law academies and textbooks, the author encourages them to see the world through the eyes of others -- an essential skill in this fast changing world of shifting power dynamics and rising nationalism.

Demonstrating the crucial role that private international law and legality has played and continues to play in shaping globalization, this book argues that the rules, institutions, and actors that make up the practice of private international law have been critical in translating political and economic power into legal regimes that have facilitated the processes of globalization. These processes depend on two fundamental types of socio-political action – the legal structuring of emerging transnational spaces and flows of goods, capital, and finance, and the legal-political reconfiguration of state power and priorities to facilitate the growth of these spaces and their penetration into national political-economic-and social spaces. While a variety of processes were involved in these forms of action, the material practices of private international law played a central role in this project of political economic reconstruction. Offering a theory of private international legality as a practice that intersects with and provides a vehicle for the mobilization of political and economic power, this book examines the construction and enrolment of private law expertise and the structural condition of pluralism in the global political economy to argue that private international law has helped construct a global political economy responsive to the priorities of powerful actors and resistant to the demands and interests of the rest of the world’s populations. It will be of interest to academics and students exploring the relationship between law, international political economy and the nature of state power.

The purchase of this ebook edition does not entitle you to receive access to the Connected eBook on CasebookConnect. You will need to purchase a new print book to get access to the full experience including: lifetime access to the online ebook with highlight, annotation, and search capabilities, plus an outline tool and other helpful resources. Transnational Law and Practice emphasizes the knowledge and skills that students need to solve the real-world transnational legal problems they are likely to encounter as lawyers in today’s globalized world—regardless of their field of practice and regardless of whether they are interested in international law as such. The casebook covers public international law and international courts; but unlike traditional international law casebooks, it urges students not to be “international law-centric” or “international court-centric” and gives them the resources to learn how to use national law and national courts, and private norms and alternative dispute resolution methods, to solve transnational legal problems on behalf of their clients. New to the Second Edition: Substantially re-written chapter on recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments to reflect recent important developments Excerpts from and discussion of new Supreme Court decisions on extraterritoriality, personal jurisdiction, the Alien Tort Statute and Foreign Sovereign Immunity Excerpts from the new Restatement (Fourth) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States and the draft Restatement of the U.S. Law of International Commercial and Investor-State Arbitration Professors and students will benefit from: A practice-oriented approach that focuses on the knowledge and skills students need to solve real-world transnational legal problems on behalf of their clients. Comparative perspectives throughout. A team of authors with a wide range of expertise and experience in transnational litigation, arbitration, international law, constitutional law and transnational business transactions. An excellent alternative to classic public international law texts for introductory or first-year courses on international or transnational law. Multiple uses: With advanced material on transnational practice in U.S. courts, also ideal for upper-division courses on international civil litigation. Practical materials not traditionally included in public international law casebooks, such as materials on transnational commercial arbitration and conflict of laws. Extensive explanatory text to facilitate student learning and notes and questions that emphasize real-world lawyering, not just theory and doctrine. Review questions at the end of each chapter to help students synthesize, logically structure, and flowchart complex material.

How today's unjust global order is shaped by uncertain expert knowledge—and how to fix it A World of Struggle reveals the role of expert knowledge in our political and economic life. As politicians, citizens, and experts engage one another on a technocratic terrain of irresolvable argument and uncertain knowledge, a world of astonishing inequality and injustice is born. In this provocative book, David Kennedy draws on his experience working with international lawyers, human rights advocates, policy professionals, economic development specialists, military lawyers, and humanitarian strategists to provide a unique insider's perspective on the complexities of global governance. He describes the conflicts, unexamined assumptions, and assertions of power and entitlement that lie at the center of expert rule. Kennedy explores the history of intellectual innovation by which experts developed a sophisticated legal vocabulary for global management strangely detached from its distributive consequences. At the center of expert rule is struggle: myriad everyday disputes in which expertise drifts free of its moorings in analytic rigor and observable fact. He proposes tools to model and contest expert work and concludes with an in-depth examination of modern law in warfare as an example of sophisticated expertise in action. Charting a major new direction in global governance at a moment when the international order is ready for change, this critically important book explains how we can harness expert knowledge to remake an unjust world.

Transnational Legal Orders offers an empirically grounded approach to the emergence of legal orders beyond nation-states that reframes the study of law and society.