Hostname: page-component-77f85d65b8-8wtlm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-03-28T20:13:38.436Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Enter the Fox—Lumping and Splitting in the Study of Transnational Networks: A Response to Stavros Gadinis

Part of: Stavros Gadinis, “Three Pathways to Global Standards: Private, Regulator, and Ministry Networks”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Robert B. Ahdieh
Robert B. Ahdieh*
Affiliation:
Center on Federalism & Intersystemic Governance, Emory Law School
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button.

Over the last two decades, the scholarly study of transnational networks has—with select exceptions—been characterized by two features.

The first is an approach to transnational networks as a relatively singular phenomenon. Networks have largely been studied as a broadly encompassing choice of institutional design—with emphasis on the common characteristics that distinguish them from other design choices, rather than those that distinguish them from one another.

Information

Type
Symposium on Stavros Gadinis, “Three Pathways to Global Standards: Private, Regulator, and Ministry Networks”
Information
AJIL Unbound , Volume 109 , 2015 , pp. 29 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2015

References

1 See Keohane, Robert O. & Nye, Joseph S., Transgovernmental Relations and International Organizations, 27 World Pol. 39 (1974)Google Scholar; Slaughter, Anne Marie, Court to Court, 92 AJIL 708 (1998)Google Scholar.

2 See, e.g., Raustiala, Kal, The Architecture of International Cooperation: Transgovernmental Networks and the Future of International Law, 43 Va. J. Int’l L. 1 (2002)Google Scholar; Zaring, David, International Law by Other Means: The Twilight Existence of International Financial Regulatory Organizations, 33 Tex. Int’l L.J. 281 (1998)Google Scholar.

3 See, e.g., Anderson, Kenneth, Squaring the Circle? Reconciling Sovereignty and Global Governance Through Global Government Networks, 118 Harv. L. Rev. 1255 (2005)Google Scholar; Verdier, Pierre-Hugues, Transnational Regulatory Networks and Their Limits, 34 Yale J. Int’l L. 113 (2009)Google Scholar.

4 Gadinis, Stavros, Three Pathways to Global Standards: Private, Regulator, and Ministry Networks, 109 AJIL 1 (2015)Google Scholar.

5 Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox 1 (Hardy, Henry ed., Princeton University Press 2013) (1953)Google Scholar.

6 See Endersby, Jim, Lumpers and Splitters: Darwin, Hooker, and the Search for Order, Science, Dec. 11, 2009, at 1496 Google ScholarPubMed (citing Charles Darwin’s letter to Joseph Dalton Hooker, distinguishing lumpers from splitters).

7 See, e.g., Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (2004); Slaughter, supra note 1.

8 See Zaring, David, International Institutional Performance in Crisis, 10 Chi. J. Int’l L. 475 (2010)Google Scholar.

9 See Brummer, Chris, Post-American Securities Regulation, 98 Cal. L. Rev. 327 (2010)Google Scholar.

10 See Rubin, Edward L., The New Legal Process, the Synthesis of Discourse, and the Microanalysis of Institutions, 109 Harv. L. Rev. 1393 (1996)Google Scholar. To be clear, some have already been engaging in just such close institutional analysis of individual networks. See, e.g., Levit, Janet Koven, A Bottom-Up Approach to International Lawmaking: The Tale of Three Trade Finance Instruments, 30 Yale J. Int’l L. 125 (2005)Google Scholar.

11 The Global Administrative Law literature, of course, has already yielded substantial fruit from its engagement of the domestic administrative law literature. See Kingsbury, Benedict et al., The Emergence of Global Administrative Law, 68 Law & Contemp. Probs. 15 (2005)Google Scholar.

12 See Pargendler, Mariana, The Rise and Decline of Legal Families, 60 Am. J. Comp. L. 1043 (2012)Google Scholar.

13 As the legal families literature also makes clear, there can be diminishing returns to such efforts as well. At the current stage in our study of transnational networks, however, such a disclosure may be a source of meaningful insight.