Lecture Series: Law without the State?
Is the development of law escaping the influence of the state in the era of globalisation? Are global systems, such as the international economy, producing their own legal structures? How far does the reach of democratic legislation still extend today? What conditions must be fulfilled if non-state law is even to be recognised as ‘law’ by state authorities and to be implemented as such? How much influence does the state exert in turn on the emergence of non-state law? And how are possible jurisdictional conflicts between the two systems to be resolved? These questions provide the chief focus of the inaugural Lecture Series of the Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’. The series of five presentations will be held over the course of the Winter Semester 2009-10 in the Hörsaalzentrum on the Westend Campus. Under the title ‘Law without the State? On the Normativity of Lawmaking beyond the State’, the series will address a topic whose importance reaches far beyond the legal sciences. Responsibility for organising this inaugural Lecture Series of the Cluster of Excellence lies with Research Area 4 of the Cluster, ‘The Formation of Legal Norms between Nations’.
The concept of law may initially appear to be closely bound up with the form of political organisation of the state. From a historical point of view, however, the phenomenon of ‘Law without the State’ is the rule rather than the exception. Whereas the history of law is measured in millennia, the ‘modern state’ is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Yet it would be shortsighted to regard the beginning of the nation-state as marking the end of the institution of lawmaking outside the ambit of the state. Lawmaking within the state, primarily through democratically legitimated legislation, neither can nor should ever extend so far that it prevents lawmaking by non-state actors. Today, in particular, we can observe, across a whole range of spheres of life, processes of making and applying law involving actors whose regulatory needs are not met by state institutions.
In the cross-border domain, the concept of ‘transnational law’ has been adopted to describe these processes. But within the domestic domain, too, non-state lawmaking is initiated by actors from different sectors of society, ranging from business enterprises, through sports associations, to consumer protection organisations and religious communities. This phenomenon raises the question of the interaction between state power and non-state law-making.
The lecture ‘Law without the State: A Survey of the Legal History’ will address this question from a historical perspective. The lecture will be presented by Prof. Thomas Duve of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt. From the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle comes Prof. Franz von Benda-Beckmann. In his lecture entitled ‘Law without the State in the State’, he will address non-state legal pluralism from an anthropological perspective. As regards the transnational domain of a law without the state, Prof. Klaus Dieter Wolf (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt) will examine the issue of the integration of private actors into transnational political steering processes (‘Corporations As Norm Entrepreneurs’). Prof. Gunther Teubner (Goethe University Frankfurt and London School of Economics) will throw light on the idea of transnational constitutionalism in his lecture on ‘Constitutions without the State? On the Constitutionalisation of Transnational Regimes’. Prof. Rainer Hofmann (Goethe University Frankfurt) will examine a modern example of law beyond the state in his presentation on ‘Modern Investment Protection Law – An Example of the Setting and Implementation of Law outside the State?’
We look forward to interesting lectures and stimulating debates!
