The atrocities of World War II make the world realise how vulnerable national constitutional arrangements are. To effectively protect civil rights and liberties, to avoid gross injustices (genocide, discrimination, etc.), and to ensure peace, international cooperation on a global scale is needed. With new international institutions and mechanisms (the United Nations, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Human rights treaties, the UN Security Council) the united nations of the world centre on the protection, freedom and welfare of individual human beings regardless where they are or in whatever system they might live. Constitutions everywhere in the world begin express the universal principles of individual autonomy, inalienable human rights, freedoms and the right to self-determination. The implementation of the latter principle heralds in the era of decolonialization. Autocratic systems (classic dictatorships) are pressured under the new universal principles by the international community to set their people free. The new generation of liberation constitutions centre on universal values, with a special focus on self-determination. In the various (new) communist systems that come up this boils down to the right of the workers to determine a socialist (non-capitalist) future with fair labour ship and property relations.

While existing scholarship is correct in stressing that policymakers pursue their interests on the global stage, the overall result is definitely not one of Pareto-optimizing rational design. We argue that global policies form protean patchworks of governance practices and competing universal value claims. Governance practices can be defined as socially meaningful patterns of action that are constitutive of the policymaking process, including its shifting playing field. Values, which capture the ideological dimension of policymaking, refer to the normative beliefs that inform the definition of global problems and the formulation of solutions. We use preliminary evidence to illustrate the value of our framework. We then offer methodological advice to assist in the empirical study and operationalization of governance practices and universal value debates. By identifying prevalent practices, our framework captures the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, while also making sense of historical shifts in dominant modes of global governance. When it comes to value debates, our framework illuminates the persistence of social conflict as the normal and expected condition of global policymaking. Normative patchworks are generated by global governors out of multidimensional ideological cleavages.

Legal ethics challenges us to do the right thing when no one is looking. Beware the lawyer who tells you that something is ‘arguably legal’. Clinical legal education in your law school helps with the answer, because it places you in contact with real clients and teaches how to be a moral lawyer. But do we choose the right thing according to law only, or law and something else? Here, we use a detailed table to examine how Chinese relational ethics are strengthened by comparisons with Western duty-based and virtue ethics frameworks, in contexts including: understanding duty versus (v) knowing your values; education through law or through character development?; asking what should I do v who should I be, v to whom do I owe respect and obedience?; action v character v harmony; rightness v excellence v social cohesion; absolute duties v judgment in choosing virtues v the Confucian balance between all; general principles v particular circumstances v loyalty in pursuit of harmony; reason v emotion v respect in relationships; rule logic v caring perspectives v appropriate role relationships; and the contrasts between universal values, cultural relativity and the political community.