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AbstractIsolated policy interventions are unlikely to effectively address a highly complex and cross‐cutting issue such as climate change. Such issues require more integrated or holistic approaches. The concept of searching for synergy across multiple objectives could then achieve better outcomes than a default position of trade‐off and collision. This contribution construes a novel principle of synergy to structure integrated decision‐making in global climate regulation through law. This article grounds its argument theoretically in the analysis of global regulation. It first develops the rationale of a regulatory principle justifying synergetic choices in rule‐design and rule‐application. It then sets out a typology of regulatory synergies – reinforcing, functional, and dormant or connecting – which can be arranged on a sliding scale and delivered with appropriate policy tools. It also suggests pathways for synergy‐as‐principle to advance beyond an effective strategy to acquiring legal bindingness within global regulation through law. Finally, this article tests the workability of this principle in four scenarios where climate protection and adjacent objectives intersect. Beyond this analysis of global climate regulation, this article points to the deeper normative foundations capable of supporting a non‐exclusionary global community.

This article is a plea for adopting a reinvigorated, analytic perspective on contemporary international law, building on MacCormick's powerful insights into law's essential structure. The article proposes that international law as whole forms an institutional normative order. The idea of institutional normative order has certain conditions. These link a normative conception of international law with the means of achieving it. The article makes three arguments on these conditions. It first argues that the function of international law is to create order in the sense of orderliness for its principal users, States and international organizations. It then claims that international law establishes normative order through international rules that are binding from the viewpoint of States and international organizations. An international process of rule-making embedded in State practice turns norms into such rules. The process is being held as a bindingness-creating mechanism because it formalizes rules through recognized means and organizes collective consent to authorize them. States and international organizations then apply these rules by exercising international legal powers under a defeasible presumption of legality. Third, the article argues that this normative order becomes institutionalized. The institutions of international law are grounded in ideas about agencies, arrangements, and master-norms that integrate the mass of international rules and principles. The article exemplifies these arguments for UN-driven international law with the relating recent jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) and Annex vii tribunals, and the Court of Justice of the European Union. The upshot of this idea of international law as institutional normative order is unity, or indeed a system. No part of international law can be seen outside of this context and hence the burden of argumentation is on those wishing to make the case for divergence.

The socially just distribution of maritime spaces and their resources among States is a key concern of the 1982 un Convention on the Law of the Sea. This concern underlies the general apportionment of those spaces to coastal States as well as the concrete delimitation of any overlapping claims. The Convention prescribes that such delimitation be equitable. Much attention so far has been given to the judicial performance of such maritime boundary delimitation. This paper focuses on the alternative of delimitation by negotiated agreement of States. It conceives of delimitation as institutionalized oceans governance. This governance seeks to achieve the indeterminate objective of equitable delimitation by combining two broad approaches with machinery for their concretization. For one, the Convention adopts a geographical approach, implemented through the concept of maritime zones extending seawards of the land. Yet the Convention also countenances a non-geographical approach based on historic titles grounded in customary law. For concretising these broad approaches into principles, rules, and decisions, the Convention institutionalizes comprehensive judicial decision-making. Courts and tribunals have indeed developed an acquis judiciaire favouring delimitation by means of the equidistance/relevant circumstances method that is binding on States. However, the Convention gives preference to the equally institutionalized negotiated delimitation of marine entitlements, by means of the agreement of the coastal States concerned. These States therefore retain a considerable margin of appreciation for negotiated delimitation, drawing on state practice to identify the principles appropriate for the individual instance. The paper first develops this governance framework and then exemplifies its workings in the case of the South China Sea, marked by several, ongoing maritime delimitation disputes to be resolved by negotiated settlement.

AbstractThrough the joint 'North Seas Countries Offshore Grid Initiative' the states bordering the North Seas are establishing shared large-scale offshore electricity infrastructure in order to exploit their offshore wind energy resources. The article argues that this international governance of oceans space comes about legally because international law, European law and national law each fulfil a specific function. The climate regime provides the normative impetus, the law of the sea allocates competences, and European law contains principles of cooperation, which are then implemented through coordinated national law. International law, European law and national law thus become functionally integrated. This analysis has significance beyond shared offshore electricity infrastructure. It illustrates the way in which the functional integration of international law, European law and national law is emerging as a distinct legal institution in its own right, separate and distinct from the various legal orders themselves.