Global Lawmakers
International Organizations in the Crafting of World Markets

Lawmaking by international organizations has enormous influence over world trade and national economies. This book explores who makes that law and how.

Susan Block-Lieb (Author), Terence C. Halliday (Author)

9781316638163, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 October 2017

474 pages, 5 b/w illus. 17 tables
22.7 x 15.1 x 2.5 cm, 0.68 kg

'… it is an important extensive empirical study of commercial law-making within UNCITRAL, and makes a valuable contribution to the theory of international organizations. Its framework as well as its informative and engaging findings will be beneficial for many researchers interested in international organization, the international system, global civil society and global governance in the years to come.' Ond?ej Svoboda, International Organizations Law Review

Global lawmaking by international organizations holds the potential for enormous influence over world trade and national economies. Representatives from states, industries, and professions produce laws for worldwide adoption in an effort to alter state lawmaking and commercial behaviors, whether of giant multi-national corporations or micro, small and medium-sized businesses. Who makes that law and who benefits affects all states and all market players. Global Lawmakers offers the first extensive empirical study of commercial lawmaking within the United Nations. It shows who makes law for the world, how they make it, and who comes out ahead. Using extensive and unique data, the book investigates three episodes of lawmaking between the late 1990s and 2012. Through its original socio-legal orientation, it reveals dynamics of competition, cooperation and competitive cooperation within and between international organizations, including the UN, World Bank, IMF and UNIDROIT, as these IOs craft international laws. Global Lawmakers proposes an original theory of international organizations that seek to construct transnational legal orders within social ecologies of lawmaking. The book concludes with an appraisal of creative global governance by the UN in international commerce over the past fifty years and examines prospective challenges for the twenty-first century.

1. Lawmaking ecologies for global markets
2. Emergence of a lawmaking ecology
3. Issue ecologies in formation
4. Delegations and delegates
5. The work of lawmaking
6. Creative design in legal technologies
7. Whose global norms?
8. The lawmaking of lawmaking
9. Rivalries
10. Inventive global governance.

Subject Areas: Transnational commercial law [LBDK], International law of transport, communications & commerce [LBD], International law [LB], Law & society [LAQ], Law [L], International institutions [JPSN], International relations [JPS], Politics & government [JP]