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Full-Text Articles in Law

Methods Of Power For Development: Weapons Of The Weak, Weapons Of The Strong, John Braithwaite Jan 2004

Methods Of Power For Development: Weapons Of The Weak, Weapons Of The Strong, John Braithwaite

Michigan Journal of International Law

Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite conducted a study during the 1990s on global business regulation, interviewing more than five hundred key players in approximately twenty globalizing business regulatory regimes. Results from that study are used in this paper to inform the identification of seven elements of American power in global governance. The paper then poses the question whether those elements can be acquired by developing countries.


The State And Globalization: Denationalized Participation, Saskia Sassen Jan 2004

The State And Globalization: Denationalized Participation, Saskia Sassen

Michigan Journal of International Law

The effort in this paper is to recover the ways in which the state participates in governing the global economy in a context increasingly dominated by deregulation, privatization, and the growing authority of non-state actors. A key organizing proposition, derived from my previous work on global cities' is the embeddedness of much of globalization in national territory, that is to say, in a geographic terrain that has been encased in an elaborate set of national laws and administrative capacities. The embeddedness of the global requires at least a partial lifting of these national encasements and hence signals a necessary participation …


The Essentially Contested Nature Of The Concept Of Sovereignty: Implications For The Exercise By International Organizations Of Delegated Powers Of Government, Dan Sarooshi Jan 2004

The Essentially Contested Nature Of The Concept Of Sovereignty: Implications For The Exercise By International Organizations Of Delegated Powers Of Government, Dan Sarooshi

Michigan Journal of International Law

The relationship between the concept of sovereignty and international organizations is often posed as being problematic. The establishment and subsequent operations of international organizations are often characterized as involving the 'loss' of a State's sovereignty and as such have been viewed with suspicion, if not antagonism, by certain domestic commentators. The response in legal journals by supporters of international organizations has been too narrow, technical, and often simply reaffirms the fears of the domestic commentators by focusing on how the organization's exercise of powers constrains the State in the exercise of its powers. The approach adopted herein is different. It …


Of Power And Responsibility: The Political Morality Of Federal Systems, Daniel Halberstam Jan 2004

Of Power And Responsibility: The Political Morality Of Federal Systems, Daniel Halberstam

Articles

In comparative constitutional discourse, Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus; we eagerly tell our European counterparts about the U.S. constitutional experience, but rarely do we listen when they talk to us about their own. Whereas Europeans routinely examine U.S. constitutionalism as an illuminating point of comparison or contrast, as Americans, we seem convinced that we have nothing to learn from looking abroad. This Article challenges that assumption. In particular, it argues that American courts and scholars have overlooked an important alternative to the dominant interpretation of the division of powers in the United States by ignoring the theory …


Pros And Cons Ensuing From Fragmentation Of International Law, Gerhard Hafner Jan 2004

Pros And Cons Ensuing From Fragmentation Of International Law, Gerhard Hafner

Michigan Journal of International Law

The system of international law has become increasingly fragmented, particularly since the end of the Cold War. This paper intends to present the main features of this development and its implications.


International Legal Pluralism, William W. Burke-White Jan 2004

International Legal Pluralism, William W. Burke-White

Michigan Journal of International Law

This symposium has sought to examine the fragmentation of the international legal system. Such a task presupposes that international law is, in fact, undergoing some form of fragmentation. A range of recent scholarship has described this so-called fragmentation in various ways and generally considered it a negative development, a threat to the legal system as we know it. This commentary challenges both these assumptions by suggesting that international law is not fragmenting, but rather is being transformed into a pluralist system. Instead of being undermined by fragmentation, the rules, the institutions, and practices of the international legal order can be …


Regime-Collisions: The Vain Search For Legal Unity In The Fragmentation Of Global Law, Andreas Fischer-Lescano, Gunther Teubner Jan 2004

Regime-Collisions: The Vain Search For Legal Unity In The Fragmentation Of Global Law, Andreas Fischer-Lescano, Gunther Teubner

Michigan Journal of International Law

Predictions of future events tend to be a rarity within the social sciences. It is an even more rare occurrence when predicted events come to pass. Niklas Luhmann's prediction on the future of global law is a memorable exception. In 1971, while theorizing on the concept of world society, Luhmann allowed himself the "speculative hypothesis" that global law would experience a radical fragmentation, not along territorial, but along social sectoral lines. The reason for this would be a transformation from normative (politics, morality, law) to cognitive expectations (economy, science, technology); a transformation that would be effected during the transition from …


Commentary To Andreas Fischer- Lescano & Gunther Teubner. The Legitimacy Of International Law And The Role Of The State, Andreas L. Paulus Jan 2004

Commentary To Andreas Fischer- Lescano & Gunther Teubner. The Legitimacy Of International Law And The Role Of The State, Andreas L. Paulus

Michigan Journal of International Law

It will come as a surprise to many readers that Professor Teubner presented their fascinating contribution on regime collision to the Michigan Journal of International Law's Symposium on a panel devoted to "the Role of the State in International Law." Indeed, one could not imagine better devil's advocates than Professor Teubner and Dr. Andreas Fischer-Lescano. They propose a radical break with a concept of international law and order based on the autonomous will of Nation-States. Accordingly, legal regulation does not only, if at all, emanate from Nation-States, but from a panoply of other public and, mostly, private actors. Thus, the …


Reply To Andreas L. Paulus Consensus As Fiction Of Global Law, Andreas Fischer-Lescano, Gunther Teubner Jan 2004

Reply To Andreas L. Paulus Consensus As Fiction Of Global Law, Andreas Fischer-Lescano, Gunther Teubner

Michigan Journal of International Law

Andreas Paulus reminds us correctly that narratives "of a world of sovereign states loosely cooperating in 'coalitions of the willing' no longer tell the whole story." One of the achievements of the 20th century has been the insertion of a vertical dimension within horizontal international law; a dimension created by the ICJ's Traction decision and the Vienna Convention of the Law of Treaties, and within which we can observe "obligations arising for states without or against their will." Any narrative that characterizes these legal norms as a simple product of interstate consensus is particularly thin if analysis focuses upon the …


The Law Of Duress And The Economics Of Credible Threats, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar Jan 2004

The Law Of Duress And The Economics Of Credible Threats, Oren Bar-Gill, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

This paper argues that enforcement of an agreement, reached under a threat to refrain from dealing, should be conditioned solely on the threat's credibility. When a credible threat exists, enforcement promotes social welfare and the threatened party's interests. If agreements backed by credible threats were not enforceable, the threatening party would not extort them and would instead refrain from deaing-to the threatened party's detriment. The doctrine of duress, which invalidates such agreements, hurts the coerced party. By denying enforcement when a credible threat exists, the duress doctrine precludes the threatened party from making the commitment necessary to reach agreement. Paradoxically, …


Mutual Assent Versus Gradual Ascent: The Debate Over The Right To Retract, Omri Ben-Shahar Jan 2004

Mutual Assent Versus Gradual Ascent: The Debate Over The Right To Retract, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

I ended Contracts Without Consent: Exploring a New Basis for Contract Liability with a reminder that the analysis was "lacking in rigor and in nuance" and that "[i]t remains for future work to explore the extent to which the approach developed. . . has the horsepower to resolve pragmatically the problems that have proven difficult for current doctrine and to examine whether these solutions advance the various social objectives associated with contract formation." Such "future work" arrived sooner than I expected. I have now had the privilege to read the three commentaries that the University of Pennsylvania Law Review solicited, …


Contracts Without Consent: Exploring A New Basis For Contractual Liability, Omri Ben-Shahar Jan 2004

Contracts Without Consent: Exploring A New Basis For Contractual Liability, Omri Ben-Shahar

Articles

This Essay explores an alternative to one of the pillars of contract law, that obligations arise only when there is "mutual assent "--when the parties reach consensus over the terms of the transaction. It explores a principle of "no-retraction," under which each party is obligated to terms it manifested and can retract only with some liability. In contrast to the all-or-nothing nature of the mutual assent regime, where preliminary forms of consent are either full-blown contracts or create no obligation, under the no-retraction regime, obligations emerge gradually, as the positions of the negotiating parties draw closer. Further, the no-retraction liability …