Global Lawmaking: International Organizations in the Crafting of World Markets

Global lawmaking by international organizations holds the potential for extensive 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: carriage of goods by sea, corporate insolvency law and secured transactions law. 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.

Susan Block-Lieb is the Cooper Family Professor in Urban Legal Issues at Fordham University’s School of Law.

Terence Halliday is Co-Director, Center on Law and Globalization, and Research Professor, American Bar Foundation. He is Honorary Professor, School of Regulation and Global Governance, The Australian National University, and Adjunct Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University.