Ebook: The Exercise of Public Authority by International Institutions: Advancing International Institutional Law

The concept of global governance, which first emerged in the social s- ences, has triggered different responses in the discipline of law. This volume contains our proposal. It approaches global governance from a public law perspective which is centered around the concept of inter- tional public authority and relies on international institutional law for the legal conceptualization of global governance phenomena. This proposal results from a larger project which started in 2007. The project is a collaborative effort of the directors of the Max Planck Ins- tute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, research f- lows and friends of the Institute, as well as eminent members of the Law Faculty of the University of Heidelberg. Most of the materials contained in this volume were first published in the November 2008 - sue of the German Law Journal (http://www.germanlawjournal.com). We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the journal’s editors in chief, Professors Russell Miller (Washington and Lee University School of Law) and Peer Zumbansen (Osgoode Hall Law School, York U- versity, Toronto), for the opportunity to publish our papers as a special issue of their journal. The 2008-2009 University of Idaho College of Law German Law Journal student editors deserve special recognition for their hard and diligent work during the publication process. At the Institute, Eva Richter, Michael Riegner and the editorial staff of this publication series were instrumental in bringing this publication to fr- tion.

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This book develops a framework for the legal analysis of global governance phenomena. Today, international institutions are responsible for more and more governance activities which cover a wide range of issue areas and which affect individuals and governments alike. So far, there exists no legal, doctrinal approach to such phenomena. The dominant social science approach is unsatisfactory from a normative standpoint: it does not allow to single out those activities on the part of international institutions which compromise individual or collective self-determination. To this end, the book proposes the concept of "international public authority." In a series of thematic studies, it identifies important hard and soft mechanisms that constitute unilateral exercises of power by the institutions of global governance. Cross-cutting analyses single out procedural and substantive principles which could become the corner stones of the further development of international institutional law.