The consequences of Brexit: some complications frominternational law

Britain’s international trade obligations seriously complicate the question of Britain’s exit from the EU, and significantly expand the range of stakeholders with a say in how the process would be managed

New Legal Realism, empiricism, and scientism: the relative objectivity of law and social science

In this article, I suggest that one of the central characteristics of New Legal Realism is the productive tension between empiricist and pragmatist theories of knowledge which lies at its core. On one side, new realist work in its empiricist posture seeks to use empirical knowledge of the world as the basis on which to design, interpret, apply, and criticize the law. On the other, in its pragmatist moments, it explicitly draws attention to the social and political contingency of any claims to empirical knowledge of the world, including its own. As a consequence, it is distinctive of much scholarship in the New Legal Realist vein that it continually enacts creative syntheses of different philosophies of truth in an attempt to be, in Shaffer's words, ‘positivist . . . interpretivist, and legal realist all at once’. The first part of this article draws on existing historical accounts of legal realism briefly to trace the problematic and ambiguous place of scientism in the legal realist tradition. Then, in the second and more important part of the article, I argue that the ambivalence of the legal realists’ vision has left us, in certain contexts, with a complicated form of mixed legal-scientific governance which has proved remarkably and surprisingly resilient in the face of late twentieth century critiques of scientific objectivity. This may be one of the most enduring legacies of the ‘old’ legal realists for those today who work in the New Legal Realist vein

Governing 'as if': global subsidies regulation and the benchmark problem

As a result of the extraordinary work of Foucault, Shapin and Schaffer, Porter, and many others, we are familiar with many of the practices of governance which emerged during the 19th century at the intersection of the modern social sciences and the modern state, as ‘naturalized’ knowledge of an objectified social body formed the foundation of specific kinds of social and political order. But over the course of the 20th century, critiques of objectivity have become commonplace, and a post-positivist epistemological revolution has taken root in many quarters. How, then, have practices of governance-through-knowledge modified themselves in response to a century of such critiques? This article takes inspiration from the work of Jasanoff, Riles, Latour and others to identify a mode of ‘governing as if’: a pragmatic mode of governance which works not through the production of objective knowledge as the shared epistemic foundation for political settlements, but rather by generating knowledge claims that stabilize social orderings precisely through their self-conscious partiality, contingency, and context-dependence. This argument is developed using the illustration of global subsidies regulation in World Trade Organization law, focussing in particular on the knowledge practices by which particular conceptions of ‘the market’ are produced and deployed in the course of its operation. The article argues that the standard criticisms of naturalized economic conceptions of the ‘free market’, developed in various scholarly traditions throughout the 20th century, do not provide an adequate account of economic governance working in ‘as if’ mode, either positively or normatively. It further argues, following Riles, that such regimes of governance derive their effectiveness fundamentally from their ‘hollow core’, and that it is in the constant and active work of ‘hollowing out’ that we are likely to find their characteristic modalities of power and underlying structural dynamics

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Regulatory 'reliance' in global trade governance

One of the most significant recent trends in global trade governance has been the increasing use of regulatory ‘reliance’ arrangements as a significant element of trade alliances. Against this backdrop, an important set of questions are raised about how existing institutions of global trade governance – especially the World Trade Organization, and international regulatory standards organisations – should respond. To what extent, and how, should such institutions facilitate reliance arrangements, and what role can they usefully play in overseeing and guiding their use? This paper begins to answer that question through a focussed case study of regulatory reliance in the agrifood sector. Four challenges are identified regarding the implementation of such arrangements: the high costs of establishment and maintenance; the lack of agreed and reliable assessment methodologies; the potential for arbitrary discrimination between trade partners; and the difficulties of dealing with regulatory change over time. In light of these challenges, the paper surveys assesses the work of existing international organisations in governing reliance arrangements in the agrifood sector. The paper concludes with a number of preliminary suggestions as to how this architecture of global governance might be supplemented or harnessed to address some of the challenges posed by reliance arrangements

Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse

Dr Durkheim’s new book on elementary forms of religion contains more than 600 pages. He is a leader of the sociological school. I have never understood why they lay so much stress on the social and collective aspects of Institutions. Man being a social animal, his creeds and laws must be of social and collective origin. “Who’s a denying of it?” We all admit it, and, indeed, take it for [116] granted. Writers who keep insisting on telling us, at great length, what we all admit are apt to fatig..

Global disordering:Practices of reflexivity in global economic governance

In this article, I offer a reinterpretation of late 20th-century ‘neo-liberal’ transformations of global economic governance. My argumentative foil is a macro-institutional interpretation of the post-1980s period in which neo-liberalism appears as programmatic institutional form and disciplinary formation. I argue that a second, and complementary, dynamic also needs to be taken into account – namely, the emergence and operationalization of a set of critical technologies for embedding practices of reflexivity within the state. I suggest, moreover, that attention to this dimension of neo-liberalization provides a new perspective on the present. I offer an interpretation of the current moment of transition as one in which a similar repertoire of neo-liberal techniques of reflexivization is, in a second iteration, being trained on the architecture of global economic governance itself