The (Re-) Constitution of the Public in a Global Arena

Abstract:     
This article deals with the prospect of public law in global governance. It analyses firstly the foundations of modern public law and considers what is left of them in the global setting. Are they still holding through States’ de-centering practices, detached from the legitimating grounds of the modern ‘idea of publicness’? What is called here the duality of public law (in its State-related political and juridical strands) fades and decouples in the sphere where inherently ‘global’ legalities originate of a deracinated type: the distinctively global ‘public’ only provides a ‘suspended public law’ and politically unsaturated. The Constitution of the Public can only resurface by recomposing, re-coupling, the legal/political duality. However, this work contends that, as case-by-case experience shows, it becomes a matter of instituting codes of legal fairness governing the inescapable interactions among legalities: transnational and supranational regimes of disembodied nature, as well as legal orders carrying persistent socio-political thickness.

I Public as Political Law. II Public through law. III ‘Penelope’s Public’: The suspended status of the globe. IV Public decoupled and the two tiers of multilevel law. V The social question of juridification. VI Models, prospects, and conclusions.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 40

Keywords: public law, global governance, modern legal and political philosophy, justice, juridification, social legitimacy

Accepted Paper Series