ABSTRACT
What is legal transnationalism? The term is taken here to cover two kinds of familiar phenomena. The first consists of emerging or newly expanded regulatory regimes with supranational scope or ambition: for example, international human rights, transnational regulation of the internet and of intellectual property, international criminal justice, international financial and trade law, international commercial arbitration and modern lex mercatoria, and WTO law. Increasingly, laws (and forms of regulation that some observers call law and some do not) reach across state boundaries – but often not in the manner of traditional international law linking states as subjects. Sometimes transnational law bypasses state authorities, or uses them as conduits for regulation created and interpreted primarily by agencies other than state authorities. Sometimes it is created ‘unofficially’ in professional practice or as collective self-regulation. Then, more ‘official’ law has to decide how to deal with it. Often transnational law is intended to affect individuals, organisations or groups directly. So ‘transnational’ refers to a reaching across nation-state borders. The second, no less important, aspect of legal transnationalism is the influence exerted directly on the regulatory policies and practices of nation states by economic, cultural and political pressures taking shape outside their borders, and to that extent beyond their control.
