ABSTRACT
The concept of global law envisages a universal community that transcends the contemporary international order of sovereign states. State sovereignty may accordingly be seen as an obstacle to global law. This chapter therefore seeks to bring global law into conversation with sovereignty. It does so by pursuing three questions: first, what is sovereignty; second, what is wrong about sovereignty; and third, what is right about sovereignty? In response to the first question, the chapter shows how state sovereignty plays a crucial role in undergirding the contemporary system of international law. In response to the second question, the argument is that what is wrong about the modern concept of sovereignty is its tendency to attribute to human institutions certain capacities properly acknowledged in God alone. Finally, in response the third question, the chapter proposes that political sovereignty should be understood as nothing more than legitimate jurisdiction, a status rightly possessed in different degrees by the ruling institutions of many different forms of human community, from the smallest and most local to the largest and most global. This is what is right about sovereignty. Conceived strictly in this last way, sovereignty is not something that should be discarded in any quest for global law.
