Global Law in Our High Speed Economy

The ongoing process of economic globalization is accompanied by what Martin Shapiro has aptly described as the "globalization of law," according to which "the whole world [increasingly] lives under a single set of legal rules" (Shapiro 1993, 37). The harmonization and unification of some areas of international economic law seems to have accelerated in recent years, legal practice is increasingly transnational in scope, international business arbitration is flourishing, and a host of global economic institutions (most prominently, the World Trade Organization) function to provide an emerging legal framework for global economic life.[1] At the same, the "set of rules" constitutive of the globalization of law often exhibits few of the virtues typically associated with traditional liberal conceptions of the rule of law. According to many studies, global law is deficient in the familiar liberal legal virtues of generality, publicity, prospectiveness, clarity, consistency, and stability.[2] Crucial features of international economic law remain, to a surprising extent, soft law disproportionately beneficial to the most privileged "global players" in the world economy (Cutler 1999, 44); international arbitration is still relatively anti-formal and non-transparent in character (Carbonneau 1990); the World Trade Organization rests on a legal agreement that even today remains plagued by innumerable exceptional clauses (Jackson 1997). In short, "global exchanges remain for the time being to a large extent insecure" (Gessner 1998, 445), and one of the sources of this legal insecurity is probably the paucity of traditional liberal legal virtues within global business transactions.