Suchergebnisse

The dominant modern account of the social basis of international law has been the "society of states" model. In this view, to the extent that international law constructs an ordered social space (a claim which has been contested since Hobbes if not before), it is a social space in which states are the actors. This view has had a profound effect on international law. For example, the doctrine of state responsibility classically understands international harms to individuals within a framework of harm to a state's rights. Normatively, to the extent justice is considered an operational concept in international law, it is considered at the level of relations between states, as the "morality of states." International human rights law is widely credited with beginning the contemporary shift away from this model. This paper argues that contemporary globalization is completing this transformation, by both requiring, and permitting, the re-casting of international law away from a "society of states" model and towards a global society model. By effectively eliminating both time and space as factors in social interaction, globalization is changing the nature of global social relations, intensifying the dynamic of obsolescence affecting the society of states model and requiring a fundamental change in the social theory of international law towards a global society of persons. Through these changes, globalization necessitates the re-casting of international law into a global public law, and expands the domain of justice as a normative criterion for international legal doctrine.

A large and growing proportion of contemporary environmental regulation is transnational, which means that it is impossible to understand environmental governance without a firm grasp of the nature of transnational environmental regulation (TER). In this illuminating work, Veerle Heyvaert offers readers a comprehensive discussion of TER, including analysis of international environmental agreements, regional and EU regulation, private environmental regulation, and governance networks, arguing that TER is highly diverse but sufficiently cohesive to allow the identification of shared characteristics that establish TER as a model of regulation. The book uncovers the key features of TER, and analyses the various intentions of TER regulators, TER's governance principles and compliance strategies, using a newly developed activity-based methodology for regulatory analysis. This book should be read by anyone seeking to understand the strengths and weaknesses of transnational environmental governance and its contribution to sustainability.

The international human rights movement is facing an existential crisis—a crisis created in part by its continuing failure to adequately address strong criticism that international human rights law (IHRL) is a form of cultural imperialism designed to destroy local religion and culture. While the debate underlying the crisis is not new, the strength of its threat to IHRL and the liberal democratic order is. One of the primary points of friction is over IHRL's seeming rejection of a group right to be governed by religious or cultural law—a right IHRL proponents fear would open the doors to discrimination against women, the LGBT community and nonconformists. Already, populist leaders like President Erdogan of Turkey have been able to capitalize on a combination of demands for a role for religion in governance and frustration with economic inequality to claw back on human rights and democratic guarantees.The debates surrounding group rights have reached an impasse that will do little to promote either human rights or greater respect for religion and culture. This Article seeks to break that impasse. First, it relies on progressive Muslim and African scholarship to tear down the assumptions shared by both IHRL and group rights proponents that make the impasse seemingly intractable: (1) that religious and cultural law are determined from the top down; and (2) that they demand total submission of their followers. Having debunked those assumptions, it then challenges both groups to consider whether a theory of substantive human rights could allow countries to guarantee individuals the right to feely and equally choose whether to be governed by religious or cultural law without risking that this choice will become a ruse for favoring the majority group or for subjugating women and vulnerable groups.