ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the range of authority claims currently being made to support transnational regulation and the kinds of legitimacy that these claims attract cannot be adequately analysed in the terms that jurists assume in considering Western state law. A temporary distancing from orthodox juristic concepts is needed. It is important to survey the range of authority claims now made and widely accepted, to ask how these can be compared and assessed, and to avoid preconceptions about their potential legal significance. The chapter argues that Max Weber’s typology of legitimate domination can usefully guide an approach that treats authority as a matter of practice and experience. Weber’s concept of charisma offers a partial template for studying kinds of authority that, at present, largely escape juristic attention. Juristic engagement with the diversity of forms of transnational authority now recognised in practice must base itself on sociolegal study of these forms and their conditions of existence. Only with the aid of such study can jurists gain perspective on the challenges of negotiating a viable shifting normative ordering of transnational regulation.
