Making Transnational Law Work in the Global Economy

Introduction

My first encounter with Professor Detlev Vagts took place far from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was browsing through the foreign law section in the library at Monash University, in distant Melbourne, Australia, when I came across his article in the Harvard Law Review on a topic that interested me a great deal at the time – the status of multinational corporations (MNCs). These entities, which have now acquired such enormous significance, were presented by Professor Vagts in a more benevolent light than I – an undergraduate law student who had been inspired by the ideals of the New International Economic Order – would care to see them. It was hard to imagine that a few years later I would have the great privilege of being a student in his class, Transnational Legal Problems, at Harvard Law School. This class addressed, in particular, the relationship between US constitutional law and international law, a field that I now know as ‘Foreign Relations Law’. For a few of us who saw ourselves as determinedly cosmopolitan – my close colleagues in that class included Pieter Bekker and Andrea Bianchi – this emphasis on domestic law was somewhat disturbing, particularly when it was further asserted that domestic law had precedence in the event of a conflict between these two systems. But that course, despite the discomfiture it generated, proved very significant and even in some ways prescient.