Prof Joost Pauwelyn gave a presentation on 'The Stagnation of International Law' at the Global Government Institute, University College of London.

It is a mantra amongst international lawyers that the field of international law is expanding, exponentially. This trend, also referred to as the legalization of world politics, may have been true until a decade ago. It is highly questionable today. Formal international law is stagnating both in terms of quantity and quality. It is increasingly superseded by “informal international lawmaking” involving new actors, new processes and new outputs. On many occasions, the traditional structures of formal lawmaking have become shackles. The international legal order has radically transformed in the past, on all three axes of actors, processes and outputs. The conceptual boundaries of how international law may look in the future are wide open. Crucially, however, also informal structures can become shackles and limit freedom. Informal lawmaking must therefore be kept accountable, through tailor-made accountability mechanisms, especially toward stakeholders not involved in the network but affected by it. In this respect, we witness the slow emergence of procedural meta-norms against which informal cooperation forms ought to be checked, which we refer to as “thick stakeholder consensus” imposing limits in respect of actors (authority), process and output. Intriguingly, this benchmark may be normatively superior (rather than inferior) to the validation requirements of traditional international law, coined here as “thin state consent”.