Globalization has brought about profound changes in the role of law for social ordering. Just as the birth of the nation state gave rise to national legal systems and an international legal order built around sovereign states, the retreat of the state in the context of globalization has led to the emergence of new forms of governance. While much is still in flux, some key features of this order can be identified:
• The proliferation of lawmaking, with multiple actors – individuals and organizations within and outside government and across nation states – claiming a stake in making norms with (de facto, if not de jure) binding power on others.
• A greater variety of binding normative instruments, including codes of conduct, standards, and best practices designed by participants in a given trade or industry, or in pursuance of a particular cause, with the authority to bind others bestowed on them by state institutions (legislatures, regulators or courts), supranational organizations, or their own power and influence (persuasion, shaming, power to exclude).
• The rise of legal particularism, as lawmaking shifts from representatives of ‘the public’ to stakeholders of a particular cause (such as industry associations or non-governmental organizations) who have the capacity to organize themselves.
• The marginalization of the unorganized public as the corollary to the new legal particularism: those who lack the power or resources to organize or whose causes lack salience have little voice in shaping the social order – even when they are directly affected and bear a substantial part of its cost.
The Center on Global Legal Transformation has been formed to create a venue for researchers from across different disciplines to study emergent processes of multiple, overlapping governance regimes with diverse stakeholders, to re-conceptualize existing theories of law and governance in light of changes currently under way, and to assess emergent regimes and draw normative implications. To this end, the Center will organize colloquia and workshops at Columbia University and its newly formed global centers, launch collaborative research projects with researchers across disciplines, sponsor postdocs and research fellows, and organize conferences.
The Center's Director is Professor Katharina Pistor.
Contact:
Center on Global Legal Transformation
Columbia Law School
(212) 854-8915
