Non-State Law
There is an interesting article by Marc Hertogh, available on SSRN, entitled “What is Non-State Law? Mapping the Other Hemisphere of the Legal World”. I suspect that some authors may dismiss the idea of non-state law out of hand (or at least that it is “Law”), but nevertheless the article is a valiant effort to sort through some of the complex and occasionally contradictory scholarship in order to help on the path to at least a workable concept.
The sections on “colonialism” and “globalization” concepts of non-state law are probably of most interest to international lawyers, but Hertogh notes that the non-state law concept entered, at least for a time, the area of “legal pluralism at home”, using such examples as Ellickson’s work on societal norms in Shasta Country (still a favorite among some law and society types or law and econ scholars, etc.). This is an interesting link to make as perhaps lawyers looking at international legal pluralism, either to support it or to critique it. also need to take more into account legal pluralism at other levels (local, national, etc.), at least to find arguments and ideas to work with (including whether or not more codified law is necessary for “international law” to be more effective). This exercise might remain useful even if the newer “globalization” notion of non-state law is, as Hertogh argues, significantly different from the “colonialism” and “legal pluralism at home” notions of non-state law.
