The Many Lives of Transnational Law
Critical Engagements with Jessup's Bold Proposal

In 1956, ICJ judge Philip Jessup highlighted the gaps between private and public international law and the need to adapt the law to border-crossing problems. Today, sixty years later, we still ask what role transnational law can play in a deeply divided, post-colonial world, where multinationals hold more power and more assets than many nation states. In searching for suitable answers to pressing legal problems such as climate change law, security, poverty and inequality, questions of representation, enforcement, accountability and legitimacy become newly entangled. As public and private, domestic and international actors compete for regulatory authority, spaces for political legitimacy have become fragmented and the state's exclusivist claim to be law's harbinger and place of origin under attack. Against this background, transnational law emerges as a conceptual framework and method laboratory for a critical reflection on the forms, fora and processes of law making and law contestation today.

Introduction: transnational law, with and beyond Jessup Peer Zumbansen; Part I. Transnational Law: The Public and the Private: 1. Jessup at the United Nations: international legacy, transnational possibilities Stephen Minas; 2. The concept of a global legal system Christopher A. Whytock; 3. How comity makes transnationalism work Thomas Schultz and Niccolò Ridi; Part II. Transnational Law as Regulatory Governance: 4. Aiding and abetting in theorising the increasing softification of the international normative order – a darker legacy of Jessup's transnational law? Karsten Nowrot; 5. From international law to transnational law, from transnational law to transnational legal orders Gregory Shaffer and Carlos Coye; 6. Transnational law in the Pacific Century: mapping pesticide regulation in China Francis Snyder, Zhouke Hu and Lili Ni; 7. Transnational law in context: the relevance of Jessup's analysis for the study of 'international' arbitration Florian Grisel; 8. Transnational Law and Adjudication – Domestic, International and Foreign Intersections Bryan Horrigan; 9. Transnational Law and Global Dispute Resolution Shahla Ali; 10. Conflicts of law and the challenge of transnational data flows Paul Schiff Berman; 11. What lex sportiva tells you about transnational law Antoine Duval; 12. Family law: a blindspot Ivana Isailovic; Part III. Transnational Law: The Field's Normative Stakes: 13. Locating private transnational authority in the global political economy A. Claire Cutler; 14. Transnational law as drama Jothie Rajah; 15. Transnational law as unseen law Natasha Affolder; 16. The Cri De Jessup sixty years later: transnational law's intangible objects and abstracted frameworks Larry Catá Backer; 17. The private life of transnational law: reading Jessup from the postcolony Prabhakar Singh; 18. After the backlash: a new pride for transnational law? Ralf Michaels; Part IV. Conclusion: Epilogue – difficulties for every solution: defining transnational law at the edge of transdisciplinarity Vik Kanwar.

Peer Zumbansen is the founding Director of the Transnational Law Institute at King's College London and teaches at King's and Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto. He is the series editor of Cambridge Studies in Transnational Law and co-editor-in-chief of Transnational Legal Theory.