Since the rise of the nation-state in the nineteenth century, constitutions have been seen as an embodiment of national values and identity. However, individuals, ideas, and institutions from abroad have always influenced constitutions, and so the process is better described as transnational. As cross-border interaction is increasing in intensity, a dominant transnational legal order for constitutions has emerged, with its own norms, guidelines and shared ideas. Yet both the process and substance of constitution-making are being contested in divergent and insurgent constitutional orders. Bringing together leading scholars from the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, this volume addresses the actors, networks, norms and processes involved in constitution-making, as well as the related challenges, from a transnational and comparative perspective. Drawing from the research on transnational legal orders, this work explores and examines constitution-making in every region of the world.

Since the rise of the nation-state in the nineteenth century, constitutions have been seen as an embodiment of national values and identity. However, individuals, ideas, and institutions from abroad have always influenced constitutions, and so the process is better described as transnational. As cross-border interaction is increasing in intensity, a dominant transnational legal order for constitutions has emerged, with its own norms, guidelines and shared ideas. Yet both the process and substance of constitution-making are being contested in divergent and insurgent constitutional orders. Bringing together leading scholars from the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, this volume addresses the actors, networks, norms and processes involved in constitution-making, as well as the related challenges, from a transnational and comparative perspective. Drawing from the research on transnational legal orders, this work explores and examines constitution-making in every region of the world.

Criminal Defense in China studies empirically the everyday work and political mobilization of defense lawyers in China. It builds upon 329 interviews across China, and other social science methods, to investigate and analyze the interweaving of politics and practice in five segments of the practicing criminal defense bar in China from 2005 to 2015. This book is the first to examine everyday criminal defense work in China as a political project. The authors engage extensive scholarship on lawyers and political liberalism across the world, from seventeenth-century Europe to late twentieth-century Korea and Taiwan, drawing on theoretical propositions from this body of theory to examine the strategies and constraints of lawyer mobilization in China. The book brings a fresh perspective through its focus on everyday work and ordinary lawyering in an authoritarian context and raises searching questions about law and lawyers, politics and society, in China's uncertain future.

This book offers a pathbreaking, empirically grounded theory that reframes the study of law and society from a predominantly national context, which dichotomizes the study of international law and national compliance into a dynamic perspective that places national, international, and transnational lawmaking and practice within a coherent single frame. By presenting and elaborating on a new concept, transnational legal orders, this book offers an original approach to the emergence of legal orders beyond nation-states. It shows how they originate, where they compete and cooperate, and how they settle on institutions that legally order fundamental economic and social behaviors that transcend national borders. This original theory is applied and developed by distinguished scholars from North America and Europe in business law (corporate bankruptcy, transport of goods by sea, secured transactions law, and international taxation), regulatory law (monetary and trade, finance, food safety, and climate change), and human rights (rule of law, use of indicators regarding human rights treaties, trials of political leaders, right to health and access to medicines, and human trafficking).

The Asian Financial Crisis dramatically illustrated the vulnerability of financial markets in emerging, transitional, and advanced economies. In response, international organizations insisted that legal reforms could help protect markets from financial breakdowns. Sitting at the nexus between the legal system and the market, corporate bankruptcy law ensures that the casualties of capitalism are treated in an orderly way.
Halliday and Carruthers show how global actors--including the IMF, World Bank, UN, and international professional associations--developed comprehensive norms for corporate bankruptcy laws and how national policymakers responded in turn. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in China, Indonesia and Korea, the authors reveal how national policymakers contested and negotiated domestic laws in the context of global pressures. The first study of its kind, this book offers a theory of legal change to explain why global/local tensions produce implementation gaps. Through its analysis of globalization, this book has lessons for international organizations and developing and transition economies the world over.

What explains divergences in political liberalism among new nations that shared the same colonial heritage? This book assembles exciting original essays on former colonies of the British Empire in South Asia, Africa and Southeast Asia that gained independence after World War II. The interdisciplinary country specialists reveal how inherent contradictions within British colonial rule were resolved after independence in contrasting liberal-legal, despotic and volatile political orders. Through studies of the longue duree and particular events, this book presents a theory of political liberalism in the post-colony and develops rich hypotheses on the conditions under which the legal complex, civil society and the state shape alternative postcolonial trajectories around political freedom. This provocative volume presents new perspectives for scholars and students of postcolonialism, political development and the politics of the legal complex, as well as for policy makers and publics who struggle to construct and defend basic legal freedoms.

Criminal Defense in China studies empirically the everyday work and political mobilization of defense lawyers in China. It builds upon 329 interviews across China, and other social science methods, to investigate and analyze the interweaving of politics and practice in five segments of the practicing criminal defense bar in China from 2005 to 2015. This book is the first to examine everyday criminal defense work in China as a political project. The authors engage extensive scholarship on lawyers and political liberalism across the world, from seventeenth-century Europe to late twentieth-century Korea and Taiwan, drawing on theoretical propositions from this body of theory to examine the strategies and constraints of lawyer mobilization in China. The book brings a fresh perspective through its focus on everyday work and ordinary lawyering in an authoritarian context and raises searching questions about law and lawyers, politics and society, in China's uncertain future.

The Asian Financial Crisis dramatically illustrated the vulnerability of financial markets in emerging, transitional, and advanced economies. In response, international organizations insisted that legal reforms could help protect markets from financial breakdowns. Sitting at the nexus between the legal system and the market, corporate bankruptcy law ensures that the casualties of capitalism are treated in an orderly way.
Halliday and Carruthers show how global actors--including the IMF, World Bank, UN, and international professional associations--developed comprehensive norms for corporate bankruptcy laws and how national policymakers responded in turn. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in China, Indonesia and Korea, the authors reveal how national policymakers contested and negotiated domestic laws in the context of global pressures. The first study of its kind, this book offers a theory of legal change to explain why global/local tensions produce implementation gaps. Through its analysis of globalization, this book has lessons for international organizations and developing and transition economies the world over.

Sociology faces troubling developments as it enters its second century in the United States. A loss of theoretical coherence and a sense of disciplinary fragmentation, a decline in the quality of its recruits, the cooptation of its clients, a muted public voice, and sinking prestige in governmental circles--these are only a few of the trends signalling a need for renewed debate about how sociology is organized. In this volume, some of the most authoritative voices in the field confront these conditions, offering a variety of perspectives as they challenge sociologists to self-examination.

Global lawmaking by international organizations holds the potential for enormous influence over world trade and national economies. Representatives from states, industries, and professions produce laws for worldwide adoption in an effort to alter state lawmaking and commercial behaviors, whether of giant multi-national corporations or micro, small and medium-sized businesses. Who makes that law and who benefits affects all states and all market players. Global Lawmakers offers the first extensive empirical study of commercial lawmaking within the United Nations. It shows who makes law for the world, how they make it, and who comes out ahead. Using extensive and unique data, the book investigates three episodes of lawmaking between the late 1990s and 2012. Through its original socio-legal orientation, it reveals dynamics of competition, cooperation and competitive cooperation within and between international organizations, including the UN, World Bank, IMF and UNIDROIT, as these IOs craft international laws. Global Lawmakers proposes an original theory of international organizations that seek to construct transnational legal orders within social ecologies of lawmaking. The book concludes with an appraisal of creative global governance by the UN in international commerce over the past fifty years and examines prospective challenges for the twenty-first century.

Global lawmaking by international organizations holds the potential for enormous influence over world trade and national economies. Representatives from states, industries, and professions produce laws for worldwide adoption in an effort to alter state lawmaking and commercial behaviors, whether of giant multi-national corporations or micro, small and medium-sized businesses. Who makes that law and who benefits affects all states and all market players. Global Lawmakers offers the first extensive empirical study of commercial lawmaking within the United Nations. It shows who makes law for the world, how they make it, and who comes out ahead. Using extensive and unique data, the book investigates three episodes of lawmaking between the late 1990s and 2012. Through its original socio-legal orientation, it reveals dynamics of competition, cooperation and competitive cooperation within and between international organizations, including the UN, World Bank, IMF and UNIDROIT, as these IOs craft international laws. Global Lawmakers proposes an original theory of international organizations that seek to construct transnational legal orders within social ecologies of lawmaking. The book concludes with an appraisal of creative global governance by the UN in international commerce over the past fifty years and examines prospective challenges for the twenty-first century.

Across the world political liberalism is being fought for, consolidated and defended. That is the case for nations that have never enjoyed a liberal political society, for nations that have advanced towards and then retreated from political liberalism, for nations that have recently shifted from authoritarian to liberal political systems, and for mature democracies facing terrorism and domestic conflict. This book tests for the contemporary world the proposition that lawyers are active agents in the construction of liberal political regimes. It examines the efficacy of a framework that postulates that legal professions not only orient themselves to a market for their services but can frequently be seen in the forefront of actors seeking to institutionalise political liberalism. On the basis of some 16 case studies from across the world, the authors present a theoretical link between lawyers and political liberalism having wide-ranging application over radically diverse situations in Asia and the Middle East, North and South America, and Europe. They argue that it is not the politics of lawyers alone but the politics of a 'legal complex' of legally trained occupations, centred on lawyers and judges, that drives advances or retreats from political liberalism, that political liberalism itself is everywhere in play, in countries with established democracies and those without liberal politics and that it is now clear that the legal arena is a central field of struggle over the shape of political power. The case studies presented here provide powerful evidence that the nexus of bar and bench in transitions towards or away from political liberalism is a force which has universal application.

This book offers a pathbreaking, empirically grounded theory that reframes the study of law and society from a predominantly national context, which dichotomizes the study of international law and national compliance into a dynamic perspective that places national, international, and transnational lawmaking and practice within a coherent single frame. By presenting and elaborating on a new concept, transnational legal orders, this book offers an original approach to the emergence of legal orders beyond nation-states. It shows how they originate, where they compete and cooperate, and how they settle on institutions that legally order fundamental economic and social behaviors that transcend national borders. This original theory is applied and developed by distinguished scholars from North America and Europe in business law (corporate bankruptcy, transport of goods by sea, secured transactions law, and international taxation), regulatory law (monetary and trade, finance, food safety, and climate change), and human rights (rule of law, use of indicators regarding human rights treaties, trials of political leaders, right to health and access to medicines, and human trafficking).

Across the world political liberalism is being fought for, consolidated and defended. That is the case for nations that have never enjoyed a liberal political society, for nations that have advanced towards and then retreated from political liberalism, for nations that have recently shifted from authoritarian to liberal political systems, and for mature democracies facing terrorism and domestic conflict. This book tests for the contemporary world the proposition that lawyers are active agents in the construction of liberal political regimes. It examines the efficacy of a framework that postulates that legal professions not only orient themselves to a market for their services but can frequently be seen in the forefront of actors seeking to institutionalise political liberalism. On the basis of some 16 case studies from across the world, the authors present a theoretical link between lawyers and political liberalism having wide-ranging application over radically diverse situations in Asia and the Middle East, North and South America, and Europe. They argue that it is not the politics of lawyers alone but the politics of a 'legal complex' of legally trained occupations, centred on lawyers and judges, that drives advances or retreats from political liberalism, that political liberalism itself is everywhere in play, in countries with established democracies and those without liberal politics and that it is now clear that the legal arena is a central field of struggle over the shape of political power. The case studies presented here provide powerful evidence that the nexus of bar and bench in transitions towards or away from political liberalism is a force which has universal application.

Corporate bankruptcy is a defining characteristic of the market economy. It encapsulates the fundamental conflict between capital and labour. Yet, with one or two notable exceptions, the political and social dynamics of bankruptcy law and practice have been largely overlooked by socio-legal scholars. This book remedies that neglect. It compares English and American insolvency laws to identify the underlying political forces that established corporate bankruptcy law on both sides of the Atlantic. It shows how corporate insovency regulation is the creation of the lawyers who interpret and administer it. This book will be welcomed as an important sociological study and advances our understanding of how substantive law results from conflicts among the professionals who help to create it.

What explains divergences in political liberalism among new nations that shared the same colonial heritage? This book assembles exciting original essays on former colonies of the British Empire in South Asia, Africa and Southeast Asia that gained independence after World War II. The interdisciplinary country specialists reveal how inherent contradictions within British colonial rule were resolved after independence in contrasting liberal-legal, despotic and volatile political orders. Through studies of the longue duree and particular events, this book presents a theory of political liberalism in the post-colony and develops rich hypotheses on the conditions under which the legal complex, civil society and the state shape alternative postcolonial trajectories around political freedom. This provocative volume presents new perspectives for scholars and students of postcolonialism, political development and the politics of the legal complex, as well as for policy makers and publics who struggle to construct and defend basic legal freedoms.

How do professional associations build their resources and establish authroity? What are the conditions under which professional expertise can be mobilized for political action? If professional organizations are endowed with a wealth of resources, do they use them responsibly or only for economic monopoly? What is the potential scope of professional action today?
In this pathbreaking study of the legal profession, Terence Halliday raises and addresses these questions combining extensive data from the rich archives o the Chicago Bar Association, one of the nation's largest and wealthiest bar organizations, with data from a national survey of bar legislative and judicial action. Beyond Monopoly demonstrates that the primary commitment of lawyers to economic monopoly has long been complemented by civic professionalism as the legal profession takes on more responsibility in the American democratic system when state capabilities diminish.
Through his examination of three types of state crises in the 1950s and 1960s--the challenges to legitimacy in the legal system, the crisis of individual rights during McCarthyism and the civil rights eras, and the fiscal crises of various state governments--Halliday shows that large bar associations can have extensive influence on any institution that is regulated by law. He argues that lawyers have the capability of turning social and political issues into technical legal matters in what he calls an idiom of legalism. Under technical guise, lawyers come to exercise moral authority.
Halliday maintains that the American legal profession over the past century has gone from a formative stage, when controlling its market in the delivery of legal services was paramount, to an established phase in the past two decades, when it has committed extensive resources to the complex needs of the modern state. A de facto bargain has been struck: if the state leaves the profession's monopoly fairly intact, the profession can use its expert resources to help the state adapt to strain and crisis. It can do so not only in the legal system, where it has been championing autonomous law, but in other spheres as well--from the economy to the private sphere of individual rights.
Halliday confirms that the legal profession deploys its expertise not merely to attain professional dominance, to control a market, or to purvey an ideology, but to increase the viability of democratic institutions. Beyond Monopoly introduces a pioneering approach to a historical and comparative sociology of the professions that will be of vital interest not only to sociologists, but to political scientists and lawyers as well.

Sociology faces troubling developments as it enters its second century in the United States. A loss of theoretical coherence and a sense of disciplinary fragmentation, a decline in the quality of its recruits, the cooptation of its clients, a muted public voice, and sinking prestige in governmental circles--these are only a few of the trends signalling a need for renewed debate about how sociology is organized. In this volume, some of the most authoritative voices in the field confront these conditions, offering a variety of perspectives as they challenge sociologists to self-examination.