Article by Bryan L. Walser
Law offers both a process for the articulation of community norms and a process for their enforcement. While the second perspective predominates in domestic law, the first has taken precedence in the international arena—and has historically been a field of significant contention. Since the end of the Cold War, however, the articulation of community norms has become newly harmonious, moving rapidly (although not uniformly) towards a shared vision of the appropriate economic and political shape of world society. What accounts for this phenomenon? In a world of diverse cultures and histories, why such broad agreement on such fundamental issues, and how has it developed so rapidly? Equally important, what further influence are these shared norms now likely to exert on the development of the international order? Specifically, what is likely to happen to our traditional conception of the state as the principal actor, and to its role in the development and enforcement of domestic law?
This broadly cross-disciplinary Article, drawing on sources from international law, the history and philosophy of regulatory policy, recent innovations in international relations theory, and recent developments in international business, argues that the confluence of technical experts in multiple discrete areas of a technology-driven global economy has facilitated the worldwide exchange of norms by opening up ostensibly “functional” areas through which these norms can be transferred with less resistance than in more intrinsically confrontational “political” circles, and that this process is likely to contribute to the future shaping of a world order deeply marked by the “unbundling” of various attributes of sovereignty and national autonomy previously considered indispensable. Arguing both empirically, from examples of recent policy changes in the international registration of new pharmaceuticals, and deductively, from the concept of expert (or “epistemic”) communities, the Article identifies the critical mechanisms of abdication, harmonization, and consolidation that underlie these new regulatory approaches, and posits that the continued exchange of technical knowledge and development of transnational communities of interest offer a particularly useful approach to further integration among the interests of the world's peoples.
About the Author
Bryan L. Walser. B.S. (Biology) 1986, Stanford University; M.D. 1991, University of Virginia School of Medicine; J.D. 1996, Harvard Law School.
Citation
72 Tul. L. Rev. 1597 (1998)