ABSTRACT
The roots of many international legal institutions in private law have been well established. The creative moment in which legal scholars attempted to understand the changing nature of authority after the demise of imperial formations and the intellectual assault on the viability of an ontologically based moral order has been recounted by legal scholars and political theorists alike.1 But even more importantly, the generative force of private law institutions for the development of the international legal order can be seen in their capacity to provide “standard solutions”2 to new problems by means of analogy. One of the most recent examples is perhaps the sic utere tuo 3 principle which has been put to good use in charting a new course for regulating trans-border pollution problems.
