This book consists of interrelated essays by many past and present members of the EUI Law Department. The contributors are all well-known specialists in their fields, whose essays address such issues as the effects of integration upon certain national laws, the elaboration of EU law to provide a new framework for or replacement for national laws, the piece-meal development of specific legal strands of EU law and their intertwining with national or international laws, and the indirect and sometimes unintended consequences of European integration with regard to national, EU, or international law.

The book marks and illustrates the significant contribution of the European University. Institute Law Department to contemporary legal scholarship. It is intended to indicate the kind of legal research which has been done and which is being done today at the EUI. It also aims to make more widely known the themes, approaches, and methods pioneered in the EUI Law Department, including its European and international focus, its comparative approach, and its generally contextual method.

The processes of legal and economic integration at a regional and global scale have created powerful legal and economic dilemmas. They challenge the paradigms of constitutionalism,including the State's monopoly of constitutionalism, the autonomy of national political communities and the traditional forms of participation and representation. The phenomena of globalisation and regional forms of governance have promoted the inter-dependence of national political communities and destroyed the artificial boundaries upon which national constitutional democracies are found and from which they derive their legitimacy. Furthermore, it is inevitable that the development of international trade and economic integration will raise claims for some form of global distributive justice to complement the wealth maximisation arising from free trade. This will come from the gradual development of global forms of political discourse and law-making, challenging State constitutionalism and requiring some of the instruments and theories of constitutionalism. The essays in this collection, written by leading scholars in international trade law, argue the pros and cons of greater regional and global regulation. They conclude that whatever the final framework for international trade, the critical decisions about institutional form and content will be decided in an emerging global political arena. They help to identify this political arena, who governs it, and according to which rules, and identify the different institutional alternatives in that global political arena.

This book consists of a series of integrated studies of sites of governance, global legal pluralism and the regulation of international trade. It focuses on the EU, the WTO and China and is divided into three parts. Part one surveys the literature on law and globalisation and introduces the theory of sites of governance and the concept of global legal pluralism. It shows that each site of governance has a structural dimension consisting of institutions, norms and dispute resolution processes and a relational dimension which refers to relations between that site and other sites of governance. The totality of sites of governance constitute a new form of global legal pluralism. Part two then focuses on the EU, the WTO and China as three distinct but interrelated sites of governance. Concentrating in particular on the example of antidumping the chapters in this part deal with international legislation, the translation of rules in domestic law, the judicial construction of multi-site governance, the types of rules which are used to regulate international trade and relations between sites, the ways in which relations between sites can create new concepts of international trade law, the transformation of norms from soft law to hard law, and the role of strategic actors, notably national administrations and international companies, in the creation and regulation of contested markets in international trade. Part three develops the main themes further by analysing two specific instances of international trade regulation: the governance of global economic networks, and the governance of global institutions. The final chapter considers ways in which global legal pluralism can enrich and possibly reform the WTO, today the predominant institution in the regulation of international trade, including trade between the EU and China.

Additional Contributor Is Melvin L. Fowler.

This book is a comprehensive reference book and commentary on basic documents about relations between the EU and the People's Republic of China from 1949 to the present. It contains all significant official and unofficial documents in English and Chinese about EU-China relations since the founding of the PRC in 1949. Since the opening-up of China in 1979, and especially after the establishment of the EU in 1992, relations between the EU and China have developed apace. Today the EU and China are 'strategic partners', with a very broad-based relationship, extending far beyond trade to encompass a growing number of important economic, political, social and cultural domains. The relationship is certain to gain in importance with increasing globalisation, EU expansion, Chinese membership of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the renewal and development of China, and changes in the international trading system and international politics. This book provides an indispensable foundation for teaching, research, policy-making and advising on EU-China relations. It includes both documents originally published in English and English translations of documents previously available only in Chinese, French or Portuguese. Essential to every library, it will also be required reading for students, teachers, researchers, policy-makers, legal practitioners and government officials in the EU, China, the United States and elsewhere.