The Erasmus Law Review has just issued a call for papers that is of real relevance for anybody seeking to write and publish on global administrative law. It raises a number of important issues, including many as yet left largely unaddressed within GAL literature generally:
Since its rise at the beginning of the 20th century, comparative legal research has gained an influential place in legal research concerning national legal systems. Comparative legal methodology is used to acquire insight into foreign legal systems, to find solutions for problems of a specific legal system, or to promote the unification of law between national legal systems. Its methods consist in a comparison of different legal systems or legal traditions (external comparison) or of fields of law within national legal systems (internal comparison). With the proliferation of regulatory regimes at the international level (e.g. in the context of the United Nations or WTO), comparative lawyers have extended their focus to the field of international law. Consensus, however, has not been reached on the most suitable way of applying comparative law methods to the global context. Can the concepts and methods developed to conduct comparative legal research of national legal systems be transposed to study the international legal system?
As the call for papers goes on to make clear, the journal is in the main interested in those writing from a comparative perspective on this issue. At least two as yet under-studied GAL issues arise clearly: firstly, the differences between different national perspectives on the meaning, scope and content of domestic administrative law, and how these might translate into the global setting (and it is worth bearing in mind here that a criticism often levelled at the GAL project, by European scholars in particular, is that it remains locked within a US "interest representation" model of administrative law); and secondly, the equally vexed question of the complex relationship between the global administrative law project on one hand, and the field of public international law on the other. The development of a body of work addressing either or both of these comparative perspectives could prove to be a very significant advance in terms of the project more generally.
Since its rise at the beginning of the 20th century, comparative legal research has gained an influential place in legal research concerning national legal systems. Comparative legal methodology is used to acquire insight into foreign legal systems, to find solutions for problems of a specific legal system, or to promote the unification of law between national legal systems. Its methods consist in a comparison of different legal systems or legal traditions (external comparison) or of fields of law within national legal systems (internal comparison). With the proliferation of regulatory regimes at the international level (e.g. in the context of the United Nations or WTO), comparative lawyers have extended their focus to the field of international law. Consensus, however, has not been reached on the most suitable way of applying comparative law methods to the global context. Can the concepts and methods developed to conduct comparative legal research of national legal systems be transposed to study the international legal system?
As the call for papers goes on to make clear, the journal is in the main interested in those writing from a comparative perspective on this issue. At least two as yet under-studied GAL issues arise clearly: firstly, the differences between different national perspectives on the meaning, scope and content of domestic administrative law, and how these might translate into the global setting (and it is worth bearing in mind here that a criticism often levelled at the GAL project, by European scholars in particular, is that it remains locked within a US "interest representation" model of administrative law); and secondly, the equally vexed question of the complex relationship between the global administrative law project on one hand, and the field of public international law on the other. The development of a body of work addressing either or both of these comparative perspectives could prove to be a very significant advance in terms of the project more generally.
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