Legal Interactions between Spheres of Authority in Global Economic Governance
The growing density of interactions between spheres of authority in global governance – the focus of the proposed research unit – puts pressure also on traditional legal structures. It challenges the traditional separation of domestic and international legal orders in favour of greater linkages and routine interaction, but it also drives strategies of distancing where greater integration had been the norm, as in the field of public international law. These dual pressures are likely to produce new configurations on both the formal and the substantive side of the interfaces between normative orders and they may drive relations between layers of law in the direction of greater enmeshment rather than formal separation or simple unity.
This project seeks to analyze these new configurations both empirically and from a theoretical angle. It aims at illuminating how the interactions between (formal and informal, public and private) spheres of authority in the global order are reflected in the theory and practice of law, using the issue area of global economic governance as an example and focusing on six jurisdictions – Germany, the UK, the US, Brazil, India and China – to inquire into the ways in which conflicts between different layers of law (and informal norms) are processed in judicial, quasi-judicial and regulatory settings.
