Lex Sportiva: A Playground for Transnational Law

Abstract

This article argues that lex sportiva, the law of international sport, is a fruitful research object in order to address three key questions raised by transnational law scholarship: What is transnational law? Is transnational law legitimate? How do we deal with transnational legal pluralism? We will address each of these questions separately, complementing each time a general analysis with empirical examples drawn from the field of lex sportiva. In our view, there is a pressing need for empirical work and pragmatic description of legal phenomena reaching beyond the state. With this in mind, this paper demonstrates that lex sportiva constitutes a pertinent legal playground to study and grasp the practical and theoretical challenges of law in a transnationalizing world.

Keywords: Transnational Law, Lex Sportiva, Global Law, Legal Pluralism, Transnational Private Regulation, Legal theory, Global governance