Review: Sustaining Paradox Boundaries: Perspectives on Internal Affairs in Domestic and International Law * A. Claire Cutler: Private Power and Global Authority: Transnational Merchant Law in the Global Political Economy

Abstract

The book under review addresses the complex interaction of hard and soft law, legal-political intervention and social practice and self-regulation, public and private law, and rules of social praxis and behaviour in transnational law. While the increased contractualization of public governance and the growing involvement of private actors in public administration has, for some time now, been the subject of legal analysis in domestic contract law and administrative law scholarship, these findings have attracted little attention from commercial and international law scholars and practitioners. Cutler's book argues for the need to embrace a more comprehensive view of the complexity of developments in national, international and transnational law, acknowledging the emergence of new norm-generating actors and the challenge posed by them and their norms to the otherwise neatly defined realms of national and international legal orders. Exploring the arguments made against and in favour of lex mercatoria, Cutler can be read as arguing for the paradoxical re-entry of the dividing lines between state and civil society, public and private, even if and because the two opposing poles cannot be married in a single unifying concept but only together constitute the poles of our orientation.