Globalization's Law: Transnational, Global or Both?

This essay argues that the numerous competing accounts of law’s globality can be usefully sorted into two rubrics, transnational law and global law. By distinguishing law as output and process from law as system and architecture, the essay argues that globalization’s law is both transnational and global, using the analogy to light’s simultaneous nature as wave and particle. After a brief inquiry into globalization and the relevant social and institutional dynamics affecting law, the essay explores “transnational law” and “global law” as conceptual responses to such changes. Accounts of transnational law are best understood as post-modernist socio-legal analyses of law’s contextual normativity, whereas global law accounts are more teleological and modernist, aiming to characterize the emerging valence and architecture of law in a global space. Both understandings are necessary, together with international and domestic law and global justice principles, for a complete understanding of law in a global space.