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Full-Text Articles in Law
Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence Of Law Beyond Borders (Introduction), Paul Schiff Berman
Global Legal Pluralism: A Jurisprudence Of Law Beyond Borders (Introduction), Paul Schiff Berman
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
We live in a world of legal pluralism, where a single act or actor is potentially regulated by multiple legal or quasi-legal regimes imposed by state, substate, transnational, supranational, and nonstate communities. Navigating these spheres of complex overlapping legal authority is inevitably confusing, and we cannot expect territorial borders to solve all the problems that arise because legal norms inevitably flow across such borders. At the same time, trying to create one universal set of legal rules is also often unsuccessful because the sheer variety of human communities and interests thwarts such efforts. Instead, we need an alternative jurisprudence, one …
The Last Days Of The American Lawyer, Thomas D. Morgan
The Last Days Of The American Lawyer, Thomas D. Morgan
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
An historic transformation is underway in the legal profession. It began about 40 years ago, but it has accelerated and became painfully evident by 2009. These are the “last days” of the American lawyer we once new. This paper, based on the new book, The Vanishing American Lawyer (Oxford 2010) by the same author, documents the progress and direction of the transformation.
The New Legal Pluralism, Paul Schiff Berman
The New Legal Pluralism, Paul Schiff Berman
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Scholars studying interactions among multiple communities have often used the term legal pluralism to describe the inevitable intermingling of normative systems that results from these interactions. In recent years, a new application of pluralist insights has emerged in the international and transnational realm. This review aims to survey and help define this emerging field of global legal pluralism. I begin by briefly describing sites for pluralism research, both old and new. Then I discuss how pluralism has come to be seen as an attractive analytical framework for those interested in studying law on the world stage. Finally, I identify advantages …
Global Legal Pluralism, Paul Schiff Berman
Global Legal Pluralism, Paul Schiff Berman
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This Article grapples with the complexities of law in a world of hybrid legal spaces, where a single act or actor is potentially regulated by multiple legal or quasi-legal regimes. In order to conceptualize this world, I introduce literature on legal pluralism, and I suggest that, following its insights, we need to realize that normative conflict among multiple, overlapping legal systems is unavoidable and might even sometimes be desirable, both as a source of alternative ideas and as a site for discourse among multiple community affiliations. Thus, instead of trying to stifle conflict either through an imposition of sovereigntist, territorially-based, …
Incrementalism: Eroding The Impediments To A Global Public Procurement Market, Christopher R. Yukins, Steven L. Schooner
Incrementalism: Eroding The Impediments To A Global Public Procurement Market, Christopher R. Yukins, Steven L. Schooner
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Following decades of international negotiations and agreements, the world's multi-trillion-dollar public procurement market appears to be maturing into a free, open international market. To reach that point, nations must lower a broad array of barriers to trade in procurement. As the U.S. experience demonstrates, purchasing agencies, laboring under the constraints of domestic preferences, may effectively seek to promote free trade. At the same time, a variety of international organizations, from the World Trade Organization to Transparency International, have developed tools and instruments - including model codes and explicit nondiscrimination agreements - that ease barriers to trade in procurement. To accelerate …
Trade And The Environment In The Wto, Steve Charnovitz
Trade And The Environment In The Wto, Steve Charnovitz
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
The linkage between trade and the environment stands out as an important challenge in global economic governance. Over the past decade, the WTO devoted considerable attention to this issue and included it on the agenda of the Doha Round. In parallel, the jurisprudence on trade and the environment has experienced significant advances. This study provides an overview of the main institutional changes at the WTO and of the developments in the jurisprudence most relevant to the interaction between the environment and trade. Specifically, this study focuses on GATT Article XX and takes note of many positive (and a few negative) …
A Pluralist Approach To International Law, Paul Schiff Berman
A Pluralist Approach To International Law, Paul Schiff Berman
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This Essay is a contribution to a recent symposium at Yale Law School asking whether there is a new New Haven School of International Law. The original New Haven School of International Law offered a significant, process-based, rejoinder to the realism and positivism that had dominated international relations theory in the United States since the close of World War II. Whereas international relations realists viewed international law as merely a product of state power relations, and positivists dismissed international law entirely because it lacked both sovereign commands and a rule of recognition, scholars of the New Haven School studied law …
Dialectical Regulation, Territoriality, And Pluralism, Paul Schiff Berman
Dialectical Regulation, Territoriality, And Pluralism, Paul Schiff Berman
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
Scholarly and policy debates about territoriality and nation-state sovereignty are turning to the ways in which such concepts might be changing in an increasingly interconnected world of interlocking governance structures and systems of communication. Robert Ahdieh's provocative and generative essay, Dialectical Regulation, 38 Conn. L. Rev. 863 (2005-2006), attempts a model for understanding this new plural order. He argues that intersystemic regulation is now a significant legal reality, and analyzes the types of interactions we would expect to see among these multiple regulatory authorities. Ahdieh aims to define dialectical regulation, in which regulators exist in some kind of formal structural …
Conflict Of Laws, Globalization, And Cosmopolitan Pluralism, Paul Schiff Berman
Conflict Of Laws, Globalization, And Cosmopolitan Pluralism, Paul Schiff Berman
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This essay is a contribution to a symposium at the January 2005 annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Conflict of Laws. More than ten years ago, German theorist Gunther Teubner called for the creation of an "intersystemic conflicts law," derived not just from collisions between the distinct nation-states of private international law, but from what he described as "conflicts between autonomous social subsystems." Since then, the web of intersystemic lawmaking Teubner described has only grown more complex. The collision of these multiple legal and quasi-legal normative systems requires, as Teubner suggested, a broader approach to …
Towards A Cosmopolitan Vision Of Conflict Of Laws: Redefining Governmental Interests In A Global Era, Paul Schiff Berman
Towards A Cosmopolitan Vision Of Conflict Of Laws: Redefining Governmental Interests In A Global Era, Paul Schiff Berman
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
It has now been ten years since the idea of global online communication first entered the popular consciousness. And while the internet has undoubtedly opened up new worlds of interaction and cooperation across borders, this increased transnational activity has also at times inspired parochialism, at least among the legislatures and courts of nation-states around the globe. Such assertions of national authority have helped to reawaken scholarly interest in the classic triumvirate of topics historically grouped together under the rubric of conflicts of laws: jurisdiction, choice of law, and recognition of judgments.
In a previous article, I argued that territorially-based conceptions …
From International Law To Law And Globalization, Paul Schiff Berman
From International Law To Law And Globalization, Paul Schiff Berman
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
International law's traditional emphasis on state practice has long been questioned, as scholars have paid increasing attention to other important - though sometimes inchoate - processes of international norm development. Yet, the more recent focus on transnational law, governmental and non-governmental networks, and judicial influence and cooperation across borders, while a step in the right direction, still seems insufficient to describe the complexities of law in an era of globalization. Accordingly, it is becoming clear that "international law" is itself an overly constraining rubric and that we need an expanded framework, one that situates cross-border norm development at the intersection …
Trans-Parliamentary Associations In Global Functional Agencies, Steve Charnovitz
Trans-Parliamentary Associations In Global Functional Agencies, Steve Charnovitz
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This article examines a new phenomenon, transparliamentary activism that focuses on particular international issues or international organizations. For example, the Parliamentary Conference on the World Bank. Such parliamentary organizing has a political significance beyond the usual transnational NGO activities because parliamentarians are elected officials. The transparliamentary activism discussed here differs from the traditional interparliamentary association going back over a hundred years. The article discusses the recent developments in the World Trade Organization and the World Bank.
The Globalization Of Jurisdiction, Paul Schiff Berman
The Globalization Of Jurisdiction, Paul Schiff Berman
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
This Article begins by surveying the myriad ways that increasing globalization of communication, travel, and trade, and in particular the rise of the Internet, have forced judges and legal scholars to "adapt" traditional rules for legal jurisdiction to the new economic and social environment. For example, if a person posts content online that is legal where posted but illegal in some place where it is viewed, can that person be subject to suit in the far-off location? How should the International Shoe "minimum contacts" test account for online contacts? Is online activity sufficient to make one "present" in a jurisdiction …
Commonalities And Prescriptions In The Vertical Dimension Of Global Corporate Governance, Lawrence A. Cunningham
Commonalities And Prescriptions In The Vertical Dimension Of Global Corporate Governance, Lawrence A. Cunningham
GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works
globalization, comparative corporate governance, path dependence, vertical corporate governance, horizontal corporate governance, mergers, stock options, auditing, convergence