Rough Consensus and Running Code: A Theory of Transnational Private Law (Hart Monographs in Transnational and International Law)

As consumer transactions and corporate activities have developed with scant regard to legal and national boundaries, private law theorists have been called upon to investigate what the international law framework might look like. Moving between ‘hard‘ and ‘soft‘ laws – as well as official, unofficial, direct, and indirect regulation – this book constitutes the first comprehensive attempt to develop the framework for a private law regulatory regime which mediates between state–society and public–private relations on the one hand, and a fast–evolving transnational normative field on the other. Rough Consensus and Running Code describes and assesses the different law–making regimes currently observable in the transnational arena. Its reassesses, in terms of its legitimacy, the transnational regulation of contracts and corporate law as undertaken by regulatory regimes which are neither purely national nor international, neither exclusively public nor private in nature. Instead the institutions and the principal actors are hybrids. The challenge for scholars of public and private international law is to incorporate the new norms into existing bodies of law and this, ultimately, is the challenge met by this new work.

About the Author:

Gralf–Peter Calliess (LL.B., Ph.D. Gottingen, Habilitation Frankfurt) holds the Chair in Private Law, Comparative and International Economic Law, University of Bremen Faculty of Law. Professor Calliess is Director of the A4 Project (‘New Forms of Legal Certainty in Globalized Exchange Processes) at the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Transformations of the State‘. Peer Zumbansen (Lic dr. Paris, LL.B., Phd., Habilitation Frankfurt, LL.M. Harvard) is the Canada Research Chair in the Transnational and Comparative Law of Corporate Governance at Osgoode Hall Law School of York University, Toronto. Professor Zumbansen is the founder and director of the Critical Research Laboratory in Law & Society and the Co–founder and Co–editor in chief of the CLPE Research Paper Series (with John Cioffi).