Transnational Law: Norms, Actors & Processes

This course is about law in a variety of transnational contexts. Its focus will be on case studies that will allow students to study how law and lawyers create and manipulate the processes that help to shape transnational norms, apply those norms and enforce them as well. Specifically, this course will first examine the following questions: What is transnational law (TL)? As Phillip Jessup put it in his seminal lecture in 1956 coining this term, Transnational Law (TL) includes all law which regulates actions or events that transcend national frontiers. Both public and private international law is included, as are other rules which do not wholly fit into such standard categories. Transnational law or, as it is sometimes called, global law is the law that falls in the gaps between states; it can include international law as well as other rules or sources of law that, as we shall see, are essentially private contract provisions between and among Multinational Corporations (MNC s), for example, lex mercatoria, the laws created by worldwide sports federations such as the Olympics committee, best practices of various global industries, standardization, voluntary rules as in corporate codes of conduct and other modes of self-regulation. Transnational law is not necessarily separate and distinct from international and domestic law it often is intertwined with these bodies of law in complex ways giving rise to the need to understand more fully just what global governance means and what legal systems it might involve.