The European Convention on Human Rights is rapidly evolving into a cosmopolitan legal order: a transnational legal system in which all public officials bear the obligation to fulfill the fundamental rights of every person within their jurisdiction. The emergence of the system depended on certain deep, structural transformations of law and politics in Europe, including the consolidation of a zone of peace and economic interdependence, of constitutional pluralism at the national level, and of rights cosmopolitanism at the transnational level. Framed by Kantian ideas, the paper develops a theoretical account of a cosmopolitan legal system, provides an overview of how the ECHR system operates, and establishes criteria for its normative assessment.

Jean L Cohen’s impressive new volume argues that the existing global order’s own internal attributes point the way to the possibility of attractive as well as realistic institutional reforms. Global dualism, she argues, suggests the advantages of constructing non-statist global federations, in which sovereign states would cooperate in far-reaching ways to tackle common problems, in conjunction with a ‘low-intensity’ – yet potentially path-breaking – constitutionalization of global governance. If properly achieved, such reforms could produce a global order better able to preserve legality, protect rights, and allow for far-reaching political autonomy. This review chiefly focuses on the author’s attempt to link her normative and political ideas, and especially her ideas about constitutional pluralism and global federations, to her analysis of the existing global order. Despite the many virtues of her reform ideas, they sometimes embody unfairly hostile views of cosmopolitan political and legal aims. Unfortunately, Cohen has not sufficiently responded to political and institutional cosmopolitans who seek potentially more far-reaching alterations to our global order than she deems desirable.

This article examines the contemporary debate about the spread of transnational law and its sovereigntist critiques. Sovereigntists argue that the rapid development of international and transnational treaties and the emergence of regional human rights courts such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) undermine sovereignty and thus pose a threat to democratic self-determination. I criticise the new sovereigntism and argue that transnational human rights strengthen rather than weaken democratic sovereignty, and name processes through which rights-norms are contextualised in polities ‘democratic iterations’. I develop the ‘authorship model of democratic legitimacy’ in order to show how constitutional rights and international human rights can be understood to be in harmony and dissonance with one another. The challenge is to think beyond the binarisms of the cosmopolitan versus the civic republican; democratic versus the international and transnational; democratic sovereignty versus human rights law. Distinguishing between state sovereignty and popular sovereignty enables us to do so. By constraining certain sovereign powers of the state, international human rights regimes and courts can enhance popular sovereignty in that they strengthen the rights of the marginalised and the excluded. The article also briefly touches upon the significance of the Alien Tort Statute in US courts from the standpoint of the development of international human rights norms and focuses on Hirst v the United Kingdom, recently adjudicated by the ECtHR, to substantiate the distinction between state and popular sovereignty.

This article interrogates the intellectual foundations of global legal pluralism as a descriptive and normative position, and assesses its core claims with reference to the changing status of individuals in the postnational realm. In order to uncover the normative core of the pluralist position, the article turns to the rich tradition of value pluralism in political philosophy, particularly as articulated by Isaiah Berlin. It argues that as a normative position, pluralism – whether applied to the abstract sphere of values or the concrete realm of legal regimes – is normatively underdetermined, offering too little guidance as to how the conflicts endemic to a pluralistic world ought to be resolved. Unless it is supplemented by other, more substantive principles of political legitimacy such as democracy, freedom, equality, or justice, the principle of pluralism applied to the global legal realm is poised to reproduce, even exacerbate, existing inequalities of power and resources among those whom it affects.

The emergence of strong authorities beyond the nation state has raised questions about the absence of democratic legitimacy at the supranational level. The usual response to this dilemma has been an attempt to uncouple the strict link between national statehood and democracy, and in the process, to confer a degree of legitimacy on supranational authorities. This article argues that such an uncoupling is unconvincing, and that within the legitimacy-democracy-statehood triangle, the uncoupling of legitimacy and democracy is a more promising strategy. The legitimacy of supranational authorities is grounded in their appeal to ‘public reason’ – a legitimacy-conferring device well-suited to supranational authorities, as illustrated in this article by the examples of the European Court of Human Rights and the WTO dispute settlement system. On this basis, the article argues that we should not see the relationship between statehood legitimacy (based optimally on electoral democracy) and supranational legitimacy (based on public reason) as mutually antagonistic and engaged in zero-sum competition. Rather, this relationship allows scope for synergy, with supranational authorities often playing an important role in supporting democracy at the nation-state level.