Conference Programme

DEBATE

Multiple Legalities

Multiplicity, it is now widely agreed, is a condition of the legal order beyond the state. As a matter of fact, multiple legal orders might overlap, intersect and enmesh; yet how exactly these different legalities interact and what kind of law emerges from this interaction is still far from understood. In our online conference, we explore how we can move beyond a simple, unitary frame to capture the relations of different legalities in the global order, bringing together scholars working in both public and private international law and transnational law, jurisprudence and legal philosophy, history and sociology of law. The conference has been facilitated by DFG and SNF.

12 January 2021

Hannah Birkenkötter, Nico Krisch

Conference Programme

Multiple legalities: a high-profile online conference on conflict and entanglement in the global legal order will be live-streamed on Verfassungsblog next week.

Hannah Birkenkötter, Nico Krisch

Multiple Legalities: Conflict and Entanglement in the Global Legal Order

Whether a bureaucrat in an environmental ministry tries to keep track of the various reporting duties she needs to comply with, or an investor seeks to understand the law of international financial transactions; whether a human rights defender faces a multi-level system of domestic and international human rights institutions with which to engage, or a professional athlete competes in a setting where rules from various entities – states, professional associations, the competition conveners – apply, there are today few (if any) situations that are governed by only one single regulatory framework. Multiplicity, it is now widely agreed, is a condition of the law beyond and increasingly also within the state.

Hannah Birkenkötter, Nico Krisch, Julia Eckert, Miguel Poiares Maduro, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Surabhi Ranganathan

Navigating Multiplicity in Law

How do different actors navigate law’s multiplicity? This panel will bring together perspectives from law, critical theory and legal anthropology to discuss how actors’ engagements with legal norms shifts our understanding of law as a unitary order.

Laura Mai, Jason Rudall, Lars Viellechner, Sarah Nouwen, Tomer Broude

Colliding Systems or Legal Tapestry?

This panel will analyse different ways in which norms from different legalities are being related: how do different forms of ordering in the field of climate change (standards, guidelines and frameworks) interact with one another? How do norms of environmental protection impact other areas of international law? And how can we best conceptualize the ways in which such norm interactions take place and provide guidance to normative conflicts – are they examples of colliding systems or instead of an emerging legal tapestry?

Poul F. Kjaer, Julia Eckert, Tobias Berger, Julie Wetterslev, Robert Hamilton

(Post)Colonial Legal Encounters

This panel investigates how international law, formal state law and Indigenous and/or religious law interact and relate to one another by contrasting the historical example of 18th century maritime provinces in Canada with contemporary legal disputes from Bangladesh and Nicaragua to. The papers use ethnographic and legal historical methods to better understand those relationships.

Michele Krech, Lucy Lu Reimers, Tomáš Morochovič, Rozemarijn Roland Holst, Larry Catá Backer, Oren Perez

Weaving the Law

How do norms get transformed and do new norms emerge from legal interactions? This panel looks at this question with three different case studies of actors weaving different legalities together: World Athletics’ engagement with the norm of gender equality; UNCLOS courts’ and tribunals’ consideration of broader norms of ocean governance; and the impact of corporate social responsibility norms on WTO law.

Hannah Birkenkötter, Gráinne de Búrca, Ralf Michaels, César Rodríguez-Garavito

Transnational Law’s Multiple Legalities

Almost seventy years after Philip Jessup coined the term “transnational law” as “all law which regulates actions or events that transcend national frontiers…both public and private international law”, the public-private law dichotomy is still deeply entrenched in legal thought. This panel brings together scholars who have regularly transcended this dichotomy in their work to discuss how legal multiplicity is impacting on our understanding of transnational law today.

Christoph Möllers, Thomas Streinz, Ralf Michaels, Nofar Sheffi, Stefania di Stefano

Cyberlegalities

How are online platforms that are used by billions of users around the world regulated? This panel looks at how platform economies such as Facebook or AirBnB are regulated and how they relate with and connect the different legalities they come into contact with. Does this challenge traditional understandings of law?

Tomer Broude, Laurence Boisson de Chazournes, B.S. Chimni, Miranda Forsyth, Laura Knöpfel

Competing Visions, Intersecting Legalities

When faced with multiple legalities, how do we know what “the law” is, and how is this notion formed by different actors coming at this question from different vantage points? This panel investigates this question through different case studies, ranging from the post-colonial state of Papua New Guinea to Northern Colombia and China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Anne Peters, Poul F. Kjaer, Surabhi Ranganathan, Oren Perez, Fulya Apaydin, Charles Roger

Networks

Informal, “soft” law has often been investigated through the lens of network authority. This panel contrasts two such perspectives from transnational law – private transnational legal regimes in the field of corporate social responsibility and the transition from and connections between informal and formal law in the field of global financial governance – with a theoretical approach that emphasizes the importance of connectivity norms for the global legal order.

Nico Krisch, Jeff Dunoff, Andrea Liese, Hannah Birkenkötter

Overlapping Spheres of Authority and Interface Conflicts in the Global Order

The Conference on Multiple Legalities is organized as part of the interdisciplinary research group “Overlapping Spheres of Authority and Interface Conflicts in the Global Order”. Three research groups present their main insights from this multi-year collaborative endeavor in conversation with Jeffrey L. Dunoff. Some research results can be found in a Global Constitutionalism Special Issue.

Sarah Nouwen, Brian Z. Tamanaha, Christoph Möllers

Multiplicity and Law’s Foundations

How does multiplicity in law beyond (and within) the state affect our understanding of the nature of law? In this discussion, international law scholar Sarah Nouwen engages in a conversation with legal philosophers Brian Z. Tamanaha and Christoph Möllers to take stock of the debate and its implications for theories of law.

Gráinne de Búrca, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Larry Catá Backer, Pascal McDougall, Gabriele Wadlig

Invisible Drivers Behind Formal Law

Formal legal rules do not appear out of thin air. Rather, their emergence is conditioned by frameworks that are invisible to the formalist perspective. This panel looks at how formal law is driven by an array of less visible factors: data, algorithms, and broader “background rules”.

Nico Krisch, Antoine Duval, César Rodríguez-Garavito, Machiko Kanetake, Caroline de Lima e Silva

Verticality and Struggles over Human Rights

How do different legal orders interact vertically? Is this interaction marked by conflict and contestation, or by compromise and collaboration? This panel looks at three different such interactions: between domestic courts and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights; between regional human rights courts and United Nations Treaty Bodies; and between Swiss domestic law and the lex sportiva.

Hannah Birkenkötter, Dana Burchardt, Brian Z. Tamanaha, Francesco Corradini, Valentin Jeutner

Images of Multiplicity: Spaces, Entanglement, Hybridity

When attempting to analyse multiple legalities, various conceptualizations have been and continue to be offered to capture this phenomenon. These different conceptualizations rest on different images of multiplicity. How do we arrive at such diverging conceptualizations, and what are the reasons behind them? This panel presents and discusses three different images of multiplicity.

Anne Peters, Laurence Boisson de Chazournes, B.S. Chimni, Jeff Dunoff

Multiple Legalities in International Law

This panel assembles four eminent international law scholars to discuss how the multiplicity of law beyond the state observed over the past two days affects the study of international law today. What are the prospects for international law as a discipline?

Hannah Birkenkötter, Nico Krisch, Mattias Kumm, Sarah Nouwen

Closing Roundtable

In closing, we aim to take stock of the two-day conference and our attempt to bring into conversation scholars from different backgrounds to understand the implications of multiplicity for the theory and practice of law beyond the state.

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