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The Constitutional Itch: Legitimizing Private Regulatory Regimes in Transnational Law

The Constitutional Itch: Legitimizing Private Regulatory Regimes in Transnational Law. Berlin Colloquium: Rethinking Law in a Global Context Rethinking the National/International Divide Humboldt University, Berlin 29 May 2012 Peer Zumbansen ,

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The Constitutional Itch: Legitimizing Private Regulatory Regimes in Transnational Law

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  1. The Constitutional Itch:Legitimizing Private Regulatory Regimes in Transnational Law Berlin Colloquium: Rethinking Law in a Global Context Rethinking the National/International Divide Humboldt University, Berlin 29 May 2012 Peer Zumbansen, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, Canada www.criticalresearchlab.org

  2. References to Transnational Governance abound. But, has TG matured into a fruitful analytical and conceptual framework?

  3. Agency Dreams, or Nightmares? Languages, Vocabularies, Terminologies and narratives to make sense of it all. From Rule of Law to Governance to Regulatory Capitalism to Transnational Regulatory Governance? But, still the same questions: Whose agency? Whose interests? Whose accountability?

  4. Deciphering the regulatory code Context: An evolutionary transformation of the regulatory landscape, which can be studied with a dual focus on: • Actors and • Norms Q : Method ? A: Start somewhere

  5. Law: A slippery subject, a phantasma, a reference framework, a normative universe Competing Definitions of Law in the background of a seemingly inevitable turn to private transnational governance regimes: • Institutionalized framework to produce, enforce and adjudicate binding norms • Process of stabilizing expectations • Emancipation (hope, liberation, voice) • Suppression (violence, silencing)

  6. But, they are not all coming out the same way: • Institutionalized framework to produce, enforce and adjudicate binding norms • Process of stabilizing expectations • Emancipation (hope, liberation, voice) • Suppression (violence, silencing)

  7. Global Law: a catch-up game Meanwhile, issue-driven developments erode institutional frameworks and prompt new, adaptive ones... • Climate Change • Trade & Migration • Terrorism/Security • Poverty & Hunger • Urbanization • Education etc

  8. The nature, roles and functions of the global lawyers The Time of the Lawyers ..., or the Regulators? • to collaborate in networked agencies, • to identify competent and authorized actors (the ‘end of delegation’ contention), • to formulate policy responses, • to identify appropriate levels of regulation, • to create adequate norms • Highly functional, particularized outlook and focus

  9. And, the Space of the Regulators: From the disaggregated state into ... regulatory networks and regimes Hybrid governance institutions and ... shifting interest coalitions (G 20), but also ... Grass-roots movements New voices, new movements and actors (eg the World Social Forum)... and the problem of ‘affectedness‘

  10. Starting to respond Responses to address the question of who‘s in and who‘s out: • Global Administrative Law • Global Constitutionalism & Cosmopolitanism • Global Governance • Regulatory Capitalism • Transnational Regulatory Governance

  11. Descriptive, or Prescriptive? (And, how would we even know?)

  12. Law, moving between the national and the global Thinking like a lawyer.... since Jessup‘s 1956 assertion, the move from the national to the global... is experienced by the lawyer as a loss of sovereignty, capacity and control Why? Global absence of established unity of law, enforcement, predictability, certainty Absence of institutionalized and effective world government, or legal order on the global scale It thus prompts a new perspective on the method and space of law: Jessup‘s answer TL

  13. The genius of transnational law Meanwhile, the global void brings about a strange assertion of confidence & nostalgia for the much missed blessings of the domestic legal order

  14. A sharper, more honest memory would reveal the frictions in the legal-political-economic-cultural order which characterizes “law“ in the nation state

  15. Keyword: Constitutionalization

  16. Transnational Contexts Legacies of WW II: • Post Barbarism Emphasis on Human Dignity • West: Positivism v Natural Law (eg Hart-Fuller Debate HLR 1958; “Radbruch Thesis” 1946; revisited in post 1989 legal proceedings in Germany and ECHR) • World: HR violations around the world, but until 1989/1990 Cold War and Ideological War Fare btw Capitalist “Freedom” and “Communism” • West: “Rights Revolution” – domestic: • Evolution of Rule of Law – Social State – Welfare State – Enabling/Moderating State; Negative Rights (curtailing state) – Positive Rights (towards the state) • The question of the Welfare State and its constitutionalizing ambitions • World: “Rights Revolution” – international/post-colonial: Covenants Civil-Political, Economic, Social & Cultural Rights ‘Generations‘ of HR

  17. Today: How to do Global Constitutionalism • Starting Points: Shared experiences, shared values, shared goals? • Starkly different experiences of the World “we” live in • Stages of Development, “Modernization” theories, “Catch-up”, Law & Development • Universalism and Contestation of HR • “End of History” – Globalization and Its Discontents (Sassen 1998, Stiglitz 2000) • Global Governance as ‘New, altogether‘?!, prompting thick or thin, small or large constitutionalisms?

  18. Maturing: Difference, Voice, Emancipation • Intricate nexus L&D plus HR: Indicators, WB‘s “Good Governance“ • Postcolonial Critique of IR and PIL • Specifically, TWAIL critique of Public International Law • World Social Forum, Indigenous Knowledge, “Another K is Possible” • Interdisciplinarity and “Enrichment” of HR Discourse, above all through Anthropology (case studies, local focus and defiance of generalities) • Methodological Challenges (compare ambivalent governance status of ILO’s 1998 Core Labour Standards)

  19. Background: Comparative Constitutionalism? • Tangibles: institutions and norms • Institutions I: Constitutions limit exercise of public and private power • Institutions II: Quis iudicabit? And the problem of judicial review • Norms I: Negative Rights • Norms II: Positive Rights • Norms III: Horizontal Rights • Norms IV: The Constitution and its normative environment/universe: Legal Pluralism Reloaded • Eg Nomos and Narrative (Robert Cover, HLR 1983) • Eg Santos, Map of Misreading (L & Soc Rev 1987) • Eg Ernest Young (Constitution outside the Constitution, Yale LJ 2007)

  20. Legitimacy of transnational governance actors is constituted in this context. Methodological proposal: Transnational constitutional pluralism

  21. Consequences Transnational constitutional pluralism as a way to address the legitimacy challenges of transnational governance Interdisciplinary, decentering, post-, or new-institutional nature of ‘Law & Globalization’ framework; Confront, not negate the heritage, achievements and pitfalls of nation-state oriented models and doctrines of law; Parallel the global interplay between different levels and sites of law making, the status and role of different actors in the creation and implementation of law with the legal pluralist universe in the nationstate transnational legal pluralism as methodology in a globally integrating world.

  22. Looking around, trying out new vocabulary: • Daniel Cohen, Introduction, in Daniel Cohen, Globalization and its Enemies [orig. Paris 2006], MIT Press 2007 (Jessica B. Baker transl.), 1-8; • David Held and Anthony McGrew, The Great Globalization Debate, in: The Global Transformations Reader(Held/McGrew eds., 2nd ed., 2003), pp. 3-8. • Peer Zumbansen, Transnational Law, Evolving, in: J.Smits (ed.), Elgar Encyclopedia of Comparative Law (2nd ed., 2012), forthcoming, available on http://ssrn.com/abstract=1975403; • Cornelia Pillard et al, Why Transnational Legal Education (2011), available at: http://ctls.georgetown.edu/documents/CTLS_Why_Transnational_Education.pdf

  23. Introduction to Transnational Actors & Norms I Case Study: Transnational Trade Regulation in the Area of Pharmaceuticals Caroline Thomas, Trade policy and the politics of access to drugs, (2002) 23:2 Third World Quarterly, 251-64; Heinz Klug, Campaigning for life: building a new transnational solidarity in the face of HIV and TRIPS, in: Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Cesare Rodriguez (eds.), Law and Counter-Hegemonic Globalization: Toward a Subaltern Cosmopolitan Legality (Cambridge: 2005), 118-139 (as PDF: http://www.law.wisc.edu/m/zjnmv/campaigning-for-life-page-proofs.405.pdf) Guadalupe A. Lopez, “From Trips to ACTA: Establishing the Intent to Uphold Access to Medicine in the Face of Ambiguity”, Blog of the National Law Review, entry from April 23, 2011: http://nationallawforum.com/2011/04/23/from-trips-to-acta-establishing-the-intent-to-uphold-access-to-medicine-in-the-face-of-ambiguity/

  24. Introduction to transnational Actors & Norms II Case Study: Labour Standards http://www.ilo.org/global/standards/lang--en/index.htm; http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2009/01/wto-core-ilo-labor-standards-human.html; Philip Alston, ‘Core Labor Standards’ and the Transformation of the International Labor Rights Regime, (2004) 15:3 European Journal of International Law, 457-521 (download); Brian Langille, Core Labor Rights – The True Story (Reply to Alston), (2005) 16:3 European Journal of International Law, 409-437 (download); Philip Alston, Facing Up to the Complexities of the ILO’s Core Labor Standards Agenda, (2005) 16:3 European Journal of International Law, 467-480 (download); Katherine V.W. Stone, A New Labor Law for a New World of Work: The Case for a Comparative Transnational Approach, UCLA School of Law Law & Economics Research Paper Series, Research Paper No. 07-02, http://ssrn.com/abstract=964685

  25. Focus on Democracy and Bottom-Up Governance SaskiaSassen, The Participation of States and Citizens in Global Governance, (2003) 10:5 Indiana Journal of Global Legal studies, 5-28 (download); JürgenHabermas (1996), Paradigms of Law, in: 17 Cardozo L. Rev. 771–784; Case Study: The World Social Forum World Social Forum Charter of Principles (http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/main.php?id_menu=4&cd_language=2); World Social Forum Concept Note: Another World is Possible, Senegal 2011, http://fsm2011.org/en/concept-note; TeivoTeivainen, The World Social Forum: Arena or Actor?, in: Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman (eds.), The World Social Forum: Challenging Empires. (Viveka: 2004), 122-129; Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 'The World Social Forum and the Global Left', (2008) 36 Politics & Society 247-270

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