Transnational Networked Constitutionalism

The emergence and increasing importance of private transnational legal structures in global governance presents a puzzle for legal theory. These new forms of transnational law (TL) can be found in diverse areas, ranging from trade‐related issues, to corporate responsibility, human and labour rights, and environmental protection. Transnational constitutionalists have argued that this phenomenon has a constitutional quality. The challenge of transnational constitutionalism lies in developing an institutional model that explains how constitutionally embedded legal authority can arise independently of the institutional structures of state‐based public law. We propose a new theoretical framework for thinking about non‐statist legal authority, which we term ‘networked constitutionalism'. We conceptualize transnational legal authority as an emergent, network‐based phenomenon and elaborate the institutional conditions that undergird its emergence. We illustrate our thesis through a network analysis of a large sample of corporate social responsibility codes.