New Perspectives on the Divide Between National and International Law

This book aims to contribute to our understanding of one of the most pressing issues of modern international law: the relationship between the international legal order on the one hand and the domestic legal orders of over 190 sovereign states on the other hand The traditional and dominant understanding of this relationship is that there exists a strict separation between the international legal order and domestic legal orders. Processes of legal globalisation and internationalisation have made this relationship much more complex. Legal authority has shifted away from the state in both vertical and horizontal directions. Forced by the pressures of interdependence, states have allowed international bodies to oversee and sometimes even implement and enforce domestic legislation. At the same time, private persons are more and more drawn into an internationalized order. Increasing cross-border flows of services, goods and capital, mobility, and communication have further undermined any stable notion of what is national and what is international. This book offers several partly complementary and partly competing perspectives that allow us understand and make sense of the complex interaction between the international and domestic sphere.

Preface ; List of Contributors ; Introduction ; 1. International Law and Inter-individual Law ; 2. Dualism - A Review ; 3. The Emerging Universal Legal System ; 4. Deterritorialization in International Law: Moving Away from the Divide Between National and International Law ; 5. The Future of International Law is Domestic (or, The European Way of Law) ; 6. Monism and Dualism: the Impact of Private Authority on the Dichotomy Between National and International Law ; 7. Shifting Boundaries: The Authority of International Law ; 8. International Law in a Process of Constitutionalization ; 9. The Emergence of the International Community and the Divide Between International and Domestic Law ; 10. The Globalization of State Constitutions ; 11. International Law and the Evolution of (Domestic) Human-Rights Law In Post-1994 South Africa ; 12. Beyond the Divide ; Index