ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces "bottom-up" international lawmaking. It offers bottom-up international lawmaking as an alternative route to law, it is important to clarify how it employs the terms "law" and "lawmaking". International law includes those rules and norms that the international community deems technically binding or hard law, namely treaties or customary international law. The chapter presents an in-depth exploration of bottom-up lawmaking in the realm of international trade and finance. Most scholarship in this area centers on a group of high-profile, treaty-based institutions—the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the European Union (EU). It expresses that there are also compelling bottom-up international lawmaking stories to tell about this world. Part II recounts three such lawmaking tales. The chapter explores how bottom-up lawmaking bears on the international law taxonomy.
