International Governance and Law: State Regulation and Non-State Law

Abstract

Around the world, the role of national regulation is debated. Legislatures are criticized for overregulation and for producing poor-quality legislation which ignores input from citizens and stifles private initiative. This has enhanced the role of non-state law, such as self-regulation and soft law. In this book, international scholars in various fields of law, as well as socio-legal studies, address the question to what extent non-state law currently influences state regulation, and what the consequences of non-state law for the role of regulation should be. One of the lessons drawn for the state legislature and state regulators is that in those policy fields where strong non-state law with a great deal of legitimacy exists, state regulation should no longer be the focus of the policy. Instead, state regulation should support the development and application of non-state law.

This paper includes has an unformatted and unedited preprint version of the introduction and the conclusions of the book.

Keywords: self-regulation, non-state law, governance, legislature, democracy, rule of law