Occupy Global Law: Against a Realist Takeover of World Rules

Abstract

A review of World Rule: Accountability, Legitimacy, and the Design of Global Governance by Jonathan GS Koppell (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

What is ‘world rule’? Worldwide rules that spread global justice? Or how global powers rule the world? The idealist-realist ambivalence governs not only the ambitious title of the book, but continues throughout the chapters. Koppell draws a differentiated roadmap of organisational details of global rulemaking bodies. Readers awaiting groundbreaking normative or theoretical insights better avoid reading. The theoretical foundations are rather weak and the indicated evolutional aspiration pretentious. Koppell celebrates an unspectacular and one-sided victory of global realism. The idea of a transnational legal field is not even touched upon. And still, not only is the rich overview and microscopic analysis of organisational designs a very useful companion for any global law scholar, but there is much critical potential hidden in the niches of the analysis, waiting to be awakened by transnational legal theory.

Keywords: global law, global justice, global governance, transnational legal theory