Transnational Law Commons^™

A Constitution Of The Earth, To Save Humanity, Luigi Ferrajoli

Buffalo Law Review

Humanity is facing one of the most dramatic moments in its history. There are several global challenges and problems that are not part of the political agenda of national governments, even though their solution is crucial for the survival of humanity.

The Shaky Democratic Legitimacy Of Cosmopolitan Law And Its Destiny In Times Of Crisis, Sergio Dellavalle

Buffalo Law Review

From its earliest introduction in 1795, the notion of cosmopolitan law has made a long way, to finally become an established reference point in the legal discourse. Nonetheless, the concept still raises four fundamental questions. The first focuses on how it has been developed and which were the fundamental authors and theoretical steps that characterized the emergence of this notion. The second and most essential question refers to the meaning of cosmopolitan law by focusing on what characterizes the legal norms that we call cosmopolitan as well as on what distinguishes them from the broader field of traditional international law. …

Why Law "Beyond The State" Need Not Be A Threat To Democratic Values, Paul Schiff Berman

Buffalo Law Review

Discussions of “law beyond the state” almost inevitably run into objections from those who believe that sub- or supranational legal orders necessarily subvert local democratic governance. Self-proclaimed populists and others express concern that the “will of the people” will be unduly subjected to the dictates of “cosmopolitan elites”1 or local factions, or corporate capture. These objections range across the political spectrum. Those on the right tend to focus on concerns that transnational orders will impose human rights or immigration rules on a national polity, while those on the left worry about trade regimes that might impose local labor or environmental …

Symposium Introduction, Jorge Fabra-Zamora

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Waves Of Freedom": Kant And The Right To Rescue On The High Seas, Aravind Ganesh

Buffalo Law Review

This Article draws upon the legal philosophy of Immanuel Kant to argue that all seafarers—from stateless migrants to billionaires on mega-yachts—possess legal rights to rescue on the high seas. These rights are of the kind legal practitioners call “human rights,” and correspond to obligations enforceable against the flag state of any Coast Guard, naval, or other “public” vessel receiving the seafarers’ distress signals. A second, corollary claim is that we must abandon the “Grotian” model of the seas as commons and view them instead as “global public goods” that the international legal order always already maintains through institutions for the …

Legality Beyond The State, David Lefkowitz

Buffalo Law Review

Inquiry into law beyond the state, or indeed within it, necessarily presupposes a concept of law. Consider, for example, H.L.A.’s account of international law.1 Hart famously characterizes law in terms of a union of primary and secondary rules.2 Understood in functional terms, primary rules govern actions, while secondary rules govern rules. Hart also pays particular attention to a special class of secondary rules, namely those that create specific offices whose occupants are empowered to identify, alter, apply, and enforce a society’s rules. An advanced legal system, then, is a practice of holding accountable constituted by both a hierarchy of norms—primary …

The Rule Of Interlegality, Nicole Roughan

Buffalo Law Review

A “recognition model of legality” grounds legality upon the normative significance of recognition of the role of the official of law, and the requirements of a moral relation of recognition between law’s officials and subjects. On this model, plural overlapping claims to legality can undermine the rule of law by disrupting recognition of both the role of the official and the moral relation of legality between officials and subjects. This Essay examines the legality deficits that arise from conflicting recognitions of officiality and subjection in contexts of overlapping state and Indigenous legal orders. In such contexts of plural overlapping claims …

The Workings Of Legal Exceptionalism: Arbitration As A Portal To Stateless Law-In-Action Regimes, Thomas Schultz

Buffalo Law Review

This Essay seeks to explores the fertility of thinking about arbitration as a portal to stateless legal regimes. Using the distinction between law in books and law in action, as well as the concepts of social and political disembeddedness and quiet politics, it argues that under the current paradigm of arbitration, it operates as a porous portal, getting corporate and natural citizens to escape into stateless law-in-action legal regimes (though in practice not into a law-in-books stateless legal regime). This raises questions of control of and accountability for the political effects of such stateless law-inaction legal regimes on the rest …

The Postnational Aspirations Of European Law, Paul Linden-Retek

Buffalo Law Review

This Essay begins from a particular quarrel over the interpretation of the German Federal Constitutional Court’s PSPP judgment of May 2020 to open onto questions of how to conceive political freedom beyond the nation-state, about the structure of postnational constitutionalism and its purposes, and, finally, about the role of courts within that structure and in light of those aspirations. In arguments defending the Court, an influential strand of constitutional theory, in this Essay represented by the intervention of Ulrich Haltern, continues to channel assumptions that constrain thinking about Europe as a postnational legal order. Assuming that political freedom is essentially …

Is International Law Progressive, Cormac Macamhlaigh

Buffalo Law Review

The rise of authoritarian populism in recent years has raised the question of whether international law can be coopted for authoritarian purposes. Tom Ginsburg has recently argued for the rise of what he calls “authoritarian international law” which, he claims, is undermining the hitherto progressive ethos of international law since the foundation of the United Nations. This paper critically examines this category of authoritarian international law. Adopting a Dworkinian interpretive methodology to the question of the normativity of international law, it argues that a putative authoritarian international law is incompatible with the normativity of international law as currently understood. This …

When European State Courts Face Post-Colonial Legality: A Private International Law Approach Inspired By Decolonial Theory, Sandrine Brachotte

Buffalo Law Review

This Essay develops avenues for private international law (PIL) to deal with cases involving the interaction between Western state law and distinctive forms of law that citizens from post-colonial states, especially African states, bring with them to Europe. Laws of the second type, which I call “postcolonial legality,” incorporate both traditional forms of legality usually dubbed “religious” and “customary” law along with state law that originates from colonial law. Drawing on some lessons from decolonial theory, I try to apply to this particular context a “less colonial” PIL theory and subsequent PIL rules and reasoning. The argument builds on the …

The Priority Of International Law, Pavlos Eleftheriadis

Buffalo Law Review

What is international law? Any theory of international law must explain both its technical nature and its moral force and must also show how the two come together in practice in order to give it the priority that it claims. For example, the genocide cases before the International Court of Justice exhibit a puzzling dedication to procedure. The Court is invited to examine the war in Gaza strictly on the basis of the Genocide Convention, without assessing any allegations of war crimes or other alleged violations of international law. The reason is a well-known procedural rule—namely that states have to …

Transnational Law As Socio-Legal Theory And Critique: Prospects For “Law And Society” In A Divided World, Peer Zumbansen

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Truth Commission Impact: A Participation-Based Implementation Agenda, Tara J. Melish

Journal Articles

With a focus on truth commissions, this Essay argues for a new approach to assessing the impact or effectiveness of transitional justice mechanisms. It recognizes at least four discernible approaches to impact assessment in the current literature. I term these “Quantifiable Truth,” “Victim Perception,” “Formal Political Rights,” and “Redistributive Development.” While each has added important and complementary insights to the field, each has also exhibited important weaknesses in its ability to speak persuasively to the question of meaningful long-term impact on the societal dynamics and institutions that lead to violence in the first place. To help fill this gap, I …

Counter-Rejoinder: Justice Vs. Justiciability?: Normative Neutrality And Technical Precision, The Role Of The Lawyer In Supranational Social Rights Litigation, Tara J. Melish

Journal Articles

An important debate is currently underway in the inter-American human rights system involving the proper approach litigators, adjudicators, and advocates should take to supranational litigation of economic, social and cultural rights. Centered on questions of jurisdiction and the proper characterization and limits of justiciability, its resolution has tremendous implications for the tools available to on-the-ground advocates, their real-world effectiveness and sustainability in adjudicatory and advocacy contexts alike, and the rationalization of the system's developing jurisprudence over the long-term.

This article book-ends a trilogy of pieces appearing in the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics by two sets of authors, …

Rethinking The "Less As More" Thesis: Supranational Litigation Of Economic, Social And Cultural Rights In The Americas, Tara J. Melish

Journal Articles

In their 2005 law review article Less as More: Rethinking Supranational Litigation of Economic and Social Rights in the Americas, James Cavallaro and Emily Schaffer argue for a "rethinking" of strategies to advance economic, social and cultural rights in the Americas. They posit that to achieve higher rates of real-world protection for such rights, social rights advocates should do two things: first, bring less litigation and, second, frame any marginal litigation that is pursued as violations of classic civil and political rights. According to the authors, this recommended course will increase the "legitimacy" of the litigation and lead to higher …