Susan Block‐Lieb and Terence Halliday: Global Lawmakers: International Organizations in the Crafting of World Markets
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Author | Sally Wheeler |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12137 |
GLOBAL LAWMAKERS: INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE
CRAFTING OF WORLD MARKETS by SUSAN BLOCK-LIEB AND
TERENCE HALLIDAY
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, vii + 456 pp., $99.99)
Block-Lieb and Halliday begin their account of law-making processes at the
United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) by
making clear that their question is not what global norms are produced but
how those global norms are produced. Law making is often invisible aside
from the obvious formalities of the democratic process. At UNCITRAL this
invisibility is even more pronounced as it is aided by an often deep tech-
nicality of substance and a sense that what is produced is a series of
uncontroversial interventions into global private law. Indeed, as chapter 2
explains, it has been part of creating global trade law in the form of model
laws, legislative guides, conventions, and codes for over 50 years. However,
how law is produced affects what law is ultimately made. This is a question
that is different from much of the globalization literature where the focus is
on the `setting, application and enforcement'
1
of rules or soft law within a
supra-national or global setting. It is also not a question that is often asked by
scholars within socio-legal studies. Their focus is more likely to be on the
`experience' of law; the empirical reality of how regulators exercise their
powers, how the regulated are constructed formally and informally by that
power. It matters much more in these instances who made the law and in
whose interests it was made rather than how it was made. Block-Lieb and
Halliday eschew the products of law making (texts and norms) for a detailed
examination of actors and their interests, agency positions and opportunities,
and the processes that underpin the production of law, broadly defined.
This book builds on over a decade of work done by Halliday with a
variety of collaborators on global legal processes. Its particular progenitor is
the work that he and others did on the UNICTRAL Working Group on
Insolvency Law where they were able to lay bare the processes by which
particular interests came to dominate the reconstruction of global bankruptcy
laws and the compromises that they are prepared to make in the face of
resistance.
2
The bankruptcy process that emerged from the deliberations of
this group
3
was not one that was United States path-dependant or Asian path-
dependent but one that was more European inspired. It allowed national
690
1 M. Djelic and S. Quack, `Globalization and Business Regulation' (2018) 44 Annual
Rev. of Sociology 123.
2 See, among other, T.C. Halliday and B.G. Carruthers, `The Recursivity of Law:
Global Norm Making and National Lawmaking in the Globalization of Corporate
Insolvency Regimes' (2007) 112 Am. J. of Sociology 1135; T.C. Halliday and B.G.
Carruthers, Bankrupt: Global Lawmaking and Systemic Financial Crisis (2009); T.C.
Halliday, S. Block-Lieb, and B.G. Carruthers, `Rhetorical legitimation: global scripts
as strategic devices of international organizations' (2010) 8 Socio-Economic Rev. 77.
3 UNICTRAL, Legislative Guide on Insolvency Law (2005).
ß2018 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2018 Cardiff University Law School
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