Law Commons^™

From The Private To The Public To The Private? Historicizing The Evolution Of Public And Private Authority, Poul F. Kjaer

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

A central assumption in much contemporary scholarship is that a central shift has taken place over the course of the last four decades: a shift from a world largely centered on public authority to a world that is increasingly dominated by private authority. The central expression of this shift is seen to be a concurring move from public to private law and thus from legislation to contract as the central legal instrument structuring economic as well as other social processes.

While developments in this direction can certainly be observed, this article provides a more nuanced perspective. Outlining a long-term historical …

Policing Corruption Post- And Pre-Crime: Collective Action And Private Authority In The Maritime Industry, Hans K. Hansen

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

How are we to understand the proliferating attempts amongst transactional corporations (TNCs) at collectively reducing the risk of corruption in business operations and interactions with state officials around the world? How are these endeavors linked to transformations of public and private authority in the global political economy? Premised on the observation that corruption is globalized and the growing efforts at tackling it equally so, this article draws on the literatures on private authority, governmentality, and criminological studies to explore anticorruption in terms of pre-crime and post-crime policing. The case of the maritime industry is analyzed, including the ways in which …

Shifting Between Public And Private: The Reconfiguration Of Global Environmental Regulation, Orr Karassin, Oren Perez

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Over the past two centuries, public environmental regulation (PER) has been progressively supplemented by private transnational regulation (PTR), creating a hybrid environmental governance regime. A fivecategory typology is developed to describe the ways in which international and national PER interact with private forms of environmental regulation. We then analyze the policy considerations that are relevant to the design of such hybrid regimes and various forms of interaction. Next, we describe two case studies that demonstrate the diversity of interactions between PER and PTR in a single regime. The case of sustainability reporting illustrates how public law builds on the expertise …

The Public And Its Problems: How The Eu's Capital Market Union Defines The Bounds Of Legitimate Knowledge And Redraws The Boundaries Of (Public) Authority, Timo Walter, Oliver Kessler

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Recent years have seen increasing theoretical and practical attempts to come to terms with the strains on public authority at the level of transnational regulation and governance. For the most part, these have followed what could be called a strategy of transposition, seeking to install functional equivalents to familiar forms of nation-state or Westphalian public authority. While useful for some analytical purposes, the validity of this strategy depends on the nature of public authority remaining unchanged: the same 'function' is now fulfilled by somebody else. In this article, we argue, in contrast, that the very form of public authority has …

Public And Private Authority In A Global Setting: The Example Of Sovereign Debt Restructuring, Matthias Goldmann

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article argues that the public-private distinction is essential for safeguarding individual autonomy and democracy. As the article shows at the example of sovereign debt restructuring, global governance has blurred the distinction between public and private actors, instruments, and processes, and this causes immediate risks for human rights and democracy. This raises the question how the public-private distinction can be maintained under the structural conditions of global governance. For that purpose, the article ventures to propose a definition of publicness for global governance inspired by discourse theory. It argues that whenever a community, defined by the prevalence of communicative action, …

The Status Of Authority In The Globalizing Economy: Beyond The Public/Private Distinction, Eva Hartmann, Poul F. Kjaer

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Over the past decades, the idea that national sovereignty and the authority of the state have been increasingly challenged or even substantially eroded has been a dominant one.' Economic globalization advancing a neo-liberal dis-embedding of the economy is seen as the major reason for this erosion. Concerns have increased about the negative consequences for the social fabric of societies, deprived of the strong shock absorption capacity that the welfare states had established in the time of the embedded liberalism to use a term John Ruggie coined. 2 The concerns have also helped nationalistic movements to gain power in many high-income …