Introduction

Summary

How must legal orders be structured such that, even if we can now speak of law beyond state borders, no emergent global legal order is in sight that includes without excluding? I will approach this question from conceptual, empirical and normative perspectives. Conceptually, I unveil a concept of law that shows how and why inclusion and exclusion are the key operation of legal ordering and of authority: institutionalised and authoritatively mediated collective action. Empirically, this book examines a clutch of normative orders to establish whether they can be understood as forms of emergent global law: the WTO, the new lex mercatoria, the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision, the International Accounting Standards Board, the Clean Clothes Campaign, the International Organization for Standardization, the Codex Alimentarius, the international human rights regime, the global commons and eBay. Normatively, the book enquires whether a rich concept of authority is available in a global context. Rejecting both universalism and relativism, it outlines the contours of an alternative concept of authority in a global context, namely, ‘restrained collective self-assertion’, the core of which is asymmetrical recognition of the other.