Abstract:
The creation of global markets rarely proceeds without the creation of institutions to enable and set parameters around global market actors, whether multinational companies, seafaring carriers, international banks or other private global investors. And yet little is known about the institutional matrix of lawmaking organizations on which markets depend. What is known about the proliferation of international institutions to rationalize the legal framework for global trade has prompted socio-legal scholars to question whether this accumulation of organizations creates legal fragmentation (Koskenniemi 2002), complexity (Alter; Kennedy), harmonization or subversion (Schaffer and Pollack 2010; Mallard 2014), the institutionalization of transnational legal orders (Halliday and Shaffer 2015a; Block-Lieb and Halliday 2015), or contestations among their proponents (Halliday and Shaffer 2015b).
This paper provides the long view of a complex of international lawmaking organizations that emerged over 150 years, ultimately to constitute an ecology of international trade lawmaking. Among other goals and practices of these organizations, the formation and evolution of this ecology turned substantially on negotiations and disputes among lawmaking IOs about which of them had the authority to formulate international instruments governing private parties’ contractual practices, a broad terrain of law that is characterized most commonly as international private law (eg, laws governing private contracts and the relationships between private actors as opposed to laws governing the interactions or agreements between states) …
Block-Lieb, Susan and Halliday, Terence C, Contracts and Private Law in the Emerging Ecology of International Lawmaking (December 15, 2014), accepted for inclusion in MAKING GLOBAL MARKETS WORK: CONTRACTS, PRICES AND INSTITUTIONS IN THE LONG TWENTIETH CENTURY (Gregoire Mallard and Jerome Sgard, eds); Fordham Law Legal Studies Research Paper No 2538556.
First posted 2014-12-17 06:59:09
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