This book offers a path-breaking, empirically grounded theory that reframes the study of law and society. It shifts research from a predominantly national context to one that places transnational, national and local lawmaking and practice within a single, coherent, analytic frame. By presenting and elaborating a new concept, transnational legal orders, Halliday and Shaffer present an original approach to legal orders that affect fundamental economic and social behaviors. The contributors generate arrays of hypotheses about how transnational legal orders rise and fall, where they compete and cooperate, and how they settle and unsettle. This original theory is applied and developed by distinguished scholars from North America, Europe and Asia in business law (taxation, corporate bankruptcy, secured transactions, transport of goods by sea), regulatory law (monetary and trade, finance, food safety, climate change), and human rights law (civil and political rights, rule of law, right to health/access to medicines, human trafficking, criminal accountability of political leaders).

‘This is a spectacular book that reshapes our approach to global law. Our analytic tools to understand transnational law have lagged badly behind developments in the real world, but these two leading socio-legal scholars and their all-star set of contributors have come to our rescue. Developing an empirically grounded theory, Halliday and Shaffer conceptualize a new approach to the study of law in a global world, and the volume applies it to myriad realms. This path-breaking collection will set the agenda in the field for many years to come.’

Tom Ginsburg - Leo Spitz Professor of International Law, University of Chicago

‘A familiar refrain in the field of international law is that scholars from different disciplines have much in common and would benefit greatly from genuine collaboration - if only they would act like it and deliver on the promise. Transnational Legal Orders delivers on that pledge and the promise, producing a genuinely interdisciplinary project, and the results are path-breaking. Scholars from various disciplines, operating under a shared concept, wrestle collectively with the growing role of law in the governance of transnational spaces, asking fundamental questions of the origins, causes, workings and consequences of these transnational legal spaces. By boring down into a diverse range of particular issue areas, from public health to human rights to economics, this volume has produced a fresh perspective of global governance. [It] represents a major contribution to the study of world politics.’

Michael Barnett - Transatlantic Academy University Professor of International Relations and Political Science, George Washington University

‘This is a theoretical landmark of socio-legal scholarship. The empirical chapters make a persuasive case that transnational legal orders can be a more serviceable framework today than national law or global law. In a book that is a delight to read, great scholars present a clear exposition of how transnational legal orders are recursively created as they transform other local, national and transnational orders.’

John Braithwaite - Distinguished Professor and Founder of RegNet (the Regulatory Institutions Network), Australian National University

‘This thoughtful volume helps explode the traditional matrix that has too long artificially divided law and lawmaking into rigid domestic and international, public and private cells. Having previously explored how transnational legal ordering changes states, two innovative social scientists have enlisted an impressive stable of interdisciplinary investigators to track how transnational legal orders evolve dynamically to constrain and facilitate social conduct in the business, regulatory, and human rights spheres. Their rich selection of case studies illuminates the growing array of techniques that transnational actors now deploy to develop legal norms and foster their percolation and penetration into the architecture of complex transnational legal orders.’

Harold Hongju Koh - Sterling Professor of International Law, Yale Law School, and former Legal Adviser, US Department of State

‘This book provides an integrative frame to the study of the rise, the change and the practice of transnational legal orders. It is theoretically innovative, interdisciplinary and enlightening. In addition, a set of rich and rigorous case studies uses this frame in a most productive way. The outcome of this effort written from a legal perspective is something that the IR study of global governance has been missing: a major step toward an integrated theory.’

Michael Zürn - Freie Universität Berlin, and Director, WZB (Berlin Social Science Center)

'Halliday and Shaffer’s new book shows, systematically and brilliantly, the value of the concept of transnational legal orders for understanding normative change in matters as different as commercial disputes and the spreading of human rights. There is much to learn from these case studies whether one takes a functional or a normative view of such developments.'

David Nelken - King’s College London

‘This is a milestone contribution. Shaffer and Halliday and their authors develop a powerful new framework of inquiry that brings out the best in theoretical and empirical global governance research: problem-driven with cutting-edge scholarly analysis regarding law in a global context, the changing and evolving roles of norm-creating actors, institutions and processes, and the political implications of this emerging sphere.’

Peer Zumbansen - Director, Dickson Poon Transnational Law Institute, King’s College London

'This book offers a path-breaking, empirically grounded theory that reframes the study of law and society. It shifts research from a predominantly national context to one that places transnational, national, and local lawmaking and practice within a single, coherent, analytic frame. By presenting and elaborating a new concept, transnational legal orders, Halliday and Shaffer present an original approach to legal orders that affect fundamental economic and social behaviours.'

Hans-W. Micklitz Source: Journal of Consumer Policy

'Halliday and Shaffer’s volume seeks to shift socio-legal research from a predominantly national context to a theoretical perspective that places transnational, national, and local law-making and practice within a single, coherent, analytic frame - that of ‘transnational legal orders'. Contributors generate hypotheses about how transnational legal orders rise and fall, where they compete and cooperate, and how they settle and unsettle.'

Source: Law and Social Enquiry