This is a book about how we might fruitfully think about global law. Few terms are more topical in the transnational legal literature. Yet there has been little serious discussion – and little agreement where there has been discussion – on what is meant by ‘global law’, if, indeed, it means anything of note at all. In what follows, I suggest that we can nonetheless arrive at a core sense of global law as an emergent idea and practice, and that our so doing is key to any proper appreciation of the ways in which law is affected by, and is responding to, the contemporary wave of globalisation. The elucidation of that core sense will not, of course, tell us how law – global or otherwise – should be (re)shaped, and how it ought to be deployed to tackle the problems of global justice. Conceptual analysis and empirical inquiry alone can never solve normative problems. Yet they can help us to understand these problems more clearly, and to provide a better route map through the moral and political maze. The hope is that the reader will emerge with a sharper sense of the complexity of the global legal environment, and of the vital forces underwriting that complexity, and so with a keener appreciation of why and how the contemporary legal world has evolved as it is has and what it would take to change it.

But what of the view that, far from supplying an explanatory touchstone, stripped of its superficial glamour ‘global law’ is simply the wrong place to start in accounting for changes in the contemporary legal condition? It is with that most basic objection, and the serious concerns about ‘global’ thinking in general that stand behind it, that we begin.

The perils and promise of global analysis

Don't mention the word

In his voluminous writings William Twining has been relentlessly curious and uniquely informative about the processes, practices, institutions, doctrines, values and aspirations through which law becomes less centred upon the jurisdiction and less dependent on the organs of the modern state, and instead gradually comes to assume a ‘global’ significance.