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From Contract To Legislation: The Logic Of Modern International Lawmaking, Timothy L. Meyer
From Contract To Legislation: The Logic Of Modern International Lawmaking, Timothy L. Meyer
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The future of international lawmaking is in peril. Both trade and climate negotiations have failed to produce a multilateral agreement since the mid-1990s, while the U.N. Security Council has been unable to comprehensively respond to the humanitarian crisis in Syria. In response to multilateralism’s retreat, many prominent commentators have called for international institutions to be given the power to bind holdout states — often rising or reluctant powers such as China and the United States — without their consent. In short, these proposals envision international law traveling the road taken by federal systems such as the United States and the …
Power, Exit Costs, And Renegotiation In International Law, Timothy L. Meyer
Power, Exit Costs, And Renegotiation In International Law, Timothy L. Meyer
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Scholars have long understood that the instability of power has ramifications for compliance with international law. Scholars have not, however, focused on how states’ expectations about shifting power affect the initial design of international agreements. In this paper, I integrate shifting power into an analysis of the initial design of both the formal and substantive aspects of agreements. I argue that a state expecting to become more powerful over time incurs an opportunity cost by agreeing to formal provisions that raise the cost of exiting an agreement. Exit costs - which promote the stability of legal rules - have distributional …