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Jan Klabbers, Anne Peters and Geir Ulfstein, THE CONSTITUTIONALIZATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.com ), 2009. xx + 393 pp. ISBN 9780199543427 (hb). £63. ISBN 9780199693542 (pb). £24.99.

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 May 2011
AuthorAntonios Tzanakopoulos
Date01 May 2011
Pages339-340
DOI10.3366/elr.2011.0053

There has been no shortage of publications on the constitution of the international community, or on the constitutionalization of international law or of specific “sectors” of international law (e.g. trade law) for that matter. Any number of international documents, sets of documents, or sets of rules has been claimed as constituting the international (legal) community, from the United Nations Charter to jus cogens norms to the judicialisation of international trade law to human rights obligations. And, to make matters worse (or at least more confusing) various understandings and conceptions of the terms “constitution” and “constitutionalization”, not to mention “international community”, have been offered. As a result, it becomes hard to disagree with a contention that x or y is the “constitution of the international community”, when “constitution” is understood in this way and “international community” in that. All this on top of more or less cognate projects to demonstrate the emergence of a global administrative – rather than constitutional – law.

In the midst of this burgeoning discussion on the potential existence of an international constitutional order, the book by Klabbers, Peters, and Ulfstein seeks to sketch what shape the constitutionalization of international law might possibly take (rather than showing definitively what the constitution of the international community is). In this, the tone of the book is decidedly normative, setting out what should happen for international law to become constitutionalized. Constitutionalization represents, in the authors' view, an appropriate (if not the most appropriate) response to what is actually happening on the ground: globalisation, fragmentation of international law, verticalisation of its organisation, and privatisation of previously public (state) functions, all this in a clearly pluralist legal environment. The authors have resolved to offer the constitutionalist response to these developments, and they have elected a unique way for doing so: not through an edited collection, nor through a typical co-authored book, but rather through a book that was “conceived and written as a joint undertaking” (vi), yet a book where each chapter bears the...

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