Global Administrative Law - Cape Town Conference

The next event in the ongoing effort to increase the incidence of developing country perspectives and scholars within the GAL project will take place in Cape Town on the 18-20 March 2008. This conference, devoted to "Global Administrative Law Issues in the African Region", and co-sponsored by New York University and the University of Cape Town, is the third such event, following on from successful meetings in Buenos Aires in March 2007 and New Delhi last week (from which draft papers and a report will soon be available online).

The Cape Town Conference will, as its title suggests, critically address a broad range of GAL and global governance related issues, with a number of panels dealing with questions of accountability, transparency and participation, and the impact of globalisation on national courts and legal systems. Other panels will focus on specific subject areas, such as trade, investment and development financing; intellectual property; labour and competition law; and the privatisation of the public security function. A detailed draft agenda is available here.

Viterbo III papers and report now available

The papers from the Viterbo III GAL seminar, focusing on the participation of private actors in global administrative law, are now available online. They deal with a wide range of different issues and global regulatory bodies, including the Clean Development Mechanism, the Basel II regulations, the ICAO, voluntary environmental standard setting and the role of TRIPS in Chinese administrative law.

A full account of the discussions at the workshop can be found here.

New Delhi - Global Administrative Law Workshop

Although based at NYU's Institute for International Law and Justice, the GAL project involves an increasing number of other academic institutions. Perhaps the longest of these collaborations is with Università La Sapienza in Rome, who have for three years now hosted an annual GAL workshop in Viterbo, Italy (the fourth of which will take place in June 2008). A central goal within the project, however, has been to encourage the active participation of scholars and institutions from developing countries, and to this end a number of conferences co-sponsored with certain institutional partners from such countries have been arranged. The first of these took place in Buenos Aires in March of this year at the University of San Andres (papers are available here).

Continuing this trend, NYU and the Center for Policy Research (CPR) in India are holding a workshop in Delhi on the 5-6 of January 2008, entitled "India, the South and the Shaping of Global Administrative Law". The workshop will address three types of issues: foundational questions, relating to the definition and scope of GAL; questions relating to the impact of global regulation on government decisions in India and the region more broadly; and questions of how domestic practices and institutions can contribute to development of GAL in general.

More concretely, the workshop will deal with issues such as accountability and transparency in the fields of development, conservation and security; the regulation of economic regulators; the role of the news media in providing accountability in global governance; the GAL-related elements of the TRIPS regime; climate change; and the administration of democracy in times of political crisis. As usual, it will include some leading academics, such as B.S. Chimni, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Richard Stewart, Benedict Kingsbury and Simon Chesterman (to name but a few), a group of younger scholars working in the field, and contributions from those engaged in the practical side of the issues raised. A draft programme and a background note are available at present: we hope to make the papers available on the GAL website at some point in early 2008.

Looks like being an extremely worthwhile event, and important in the context of broadening the perspectives that are informing the development of the GAL project. For those who can, get along; for those who can't, we'll make a summary of discussions available here shortly after the event...

Welcome to the new Global Administrative Law blog!

Welcome to the blog of New York University Law School's Global Administrative Law Project. The purpose in this site is to provide information about the Project (for example, on upcoming seminars and workshops, and interesting new research and publications); and, with luck, to stimulate interesting discussion and debate on relevant issues among the growing network of scholars and practitioners involved in this emerging field.

Our plan is to update the site with new information or analysis several times a week, so please bookmark this page and refer back often; and, most importantly, any and all constructive comments and criticisms are most welcome!