Neil Walker, Intimations of Global Law
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2017.0447 |
| Pages | 461-462 |
| Author |
“Global law is here to stay” remarks Neil Walker (174), and his seminal book is a necessary resource for lawyers and political theorists seeking to appreciate the breadth of global law, re-conceptualise it, and reflect on its future development. Walker's stated ambition for this book is to provide readers “with a sharper sense of the complexity of the global legal environment, and of the vital forces underwriting this complexity” (1). The volume succeeds in this goal: impressively broad, analytically robust, and densely-argued in 212 pages, it offers a multi-layered analysis of the idea of global law from a rhetorical, structural, and epistemic perspective. It provides two visions of global law which constitute a thought-provoking organising framework on which future work can build.
Walker begins in chapter one by defining global law as “a practical endorsement of or commitment to the universal or otherwise global-in-general warrant of some laws or some dimensions of law” (18). As this definition suggests, global law is linked to and responds to other diverse and particular forms of law; this link is captured by the term “double normativity” and developed further in chapter four (23, 132, 171). Chapter two introduces the idea of a “global law-craft” and sketches the development of a global perspective in professional and academic practice. Chapters three and four, which constitute the descriptive and analytical bulk of the book and the focus of this review, explore the two visions and seven species of global law and their interrelations. Chapter five returns to the title of the book and traces the key qualities of global law reflected in its “intimated” nature: global law is largely projected and future-orientated, oblique, fluid, and inexorable. The concluding chapter engages critically with objections to global law and looks to its future development. Interestingly, this chapter explores how the species of global law map onto the well-known distinction between law as
A brief review cannot do justice to the rich and textured analysis in these chapters. I consider the most fascinating aspect of this work to be the mapping of the diverse forms or species of global law and, more importantly, the interface between them. These species are categorised under two main visions of global law: convergence-promoting or divergence-accommodating. Both approaches, Walker explains, “acknowledge and seek to address the increasing complexity of...
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