01 - Shaffer (2012) - Transnational Legal Process and State Change

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Law & the American
Social Inquiry Bar Foundation
Law & Social Inquiry

Volume 37, Issue 2, 229–264, Spring 2012
Transnational Legal Process and

State Change
Gregory Shaffer
This article applies a sociolegal approach to the study of transnational legal processes
and their effects within countries. First, we clarify the concepts of transnational law,
transnational legal process, and transnational legal order. Second, we provide a typology
of five dimensions of state change that we can assess empirically. Third, we explain the
factors that determine the variable effects of transnational legal processes and organize
these factors into three clusters. Fourth, we introduce four empirical studies of transna-
tional legal processes’ differential effects in five regulatory areas in Asia, Africa, and
South America that illustrate these points. Together, they provide a guide of how to study
the interaction of transnational and national legal processes, and the extent and limits of
transnational legal processes’ effects.
INTRODUCTION
We live in an age of transnationalism. We always have, but its intensity has

increased. The origin of US law, for example, comes predominantly from empire. Most
remotely, it comes from Rome. Closer in time, it comes from England and its common
law heritage. Most recently, it comes from the intensification of transnational economic
and cultural interaction, catalyzing a proliferation of international, regional, and bilat-
eral agreements, regulatory networks and institutions, which foment and promote legal
and institutional change. We unconsciously experience such transnationalism in our
daily lives, and we sometimes embrace it. Yet, we can also be anxious about its effects
on our social order and our identities. Our laws and legal systems reflect how we see our
communities and ourselves. As the migration of law across borders intensifies, we can
become anxious about it, as reflected in the current US clamor over citations to foreign
and international law and legal decisions in federal courts.
Legal norms, in almost all domains of law, circulate around the globe. The norms
do not travel by themselves. Actors convey them, whether instrumentally or reflexively.
International treaties codify them, whether of a binding or nonbinding nature. At other
times, they are diffused through informal processes involving bureaucratic networks of
public officials, transnational networks of private actors such as business representatives,
Gregory Shaffer is Melvin C. Steen Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School. He
can be reached at [email protected]. He wishes to thank for their comments Bobby Ahdieh, William Alford,
Karen Alter, Elizabeth Boyle, Jeffrey Dunoff, Bryant Garth, Tom Ginsburg, Terence Halliday, Minzee Kim,
Heinz Klug, Bronwen Morgan, Leigh Payne, Judith Resnik, Brian Tamanaha, Lucie White, the participants
at workshops at Arizona State, Harvard, the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin,
panels for the Transnational Legal Orders CRN in 2009 and 2010 at the Law and Society Association annual
meetings, panels at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics and the Society of International
Economic Law meetings in 2010, and three anonymous reviewers.
© 2011 American Bar Foundation. 229

230 LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY
nongovernmental activists and professionals, and hybrid combinations. Over time,

distinct transnational legal orders may emerge that impose or impart legal norms govern-
ing particular areas of law. Where the transnational legal norms are relatively clear,
coherent, and accepted, the transnational legal order can be viewed in systematic terms.
Where they are less so, the transnational legal order is more contingent and fragile. The
effects of transnational legal norm conveyance, however, are not homogeneous across
states. They vary in light of identifiable factors. Transnational legal processes, the pro-
cesses through which these norms are constructed, carried, and conveyed, always
confront national and local processes that may block, adapt, translate, or appropriate a
transnational legal norm and spur its reassessment.
Although the terms transnational law, transnational legal process, and state trans-
formations are increasingly used, we need clarifying conceptual work and empirical
study. This introductory article provides a sociolegal framework for assessing transna-
tional legal processes and their variable impacts within states, with a particular focus on
non–Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.
First, the article clarifies the concepts of transnational law, transnational legal process,
transnational legal order, state change and transformation, and recursivity. Second, it
provides a typology of five dimensions of state change that are at stake and that we can
assess empirically. Third, it explains the factors that determine the extent, location,
timing, and limits of transnational legal processes, and organizes these factors into three
clusters.
The article builds from the four comparative empirical studies that follow it, each
of which is grounded in close attention to regulatory struggles and changes in countries.
Each illustrates sociolegal approaches to how transnational legal processes work and
interact with national law and institutions. Through the comparative framework, the
studies examine variation in the reception and appropriation of transnational legal
norms. They cover the following countries and regulatory domains:
• Bankruptcy law in China, Korea, and Indonesia, by Terence Halliday;
• Patent law and competition law in South Africa, by Heinz Klug;
• Anti-money laundering law in Brazil and Argentina, by Maira Machado; and
• Primary education law and policy in over seventy low- and middle-income countries,
by Minzee Kim and Elizabeth Boyle.
The studies were chosen based on their coverage of a range of legal domains in a
range of countries in Asia, Africa, and South America. Many studies of law and
globalization have focused exclusively on OECD nations; thus, these studies help fill a
gap. The countries vary in terms of their institutional legacies, their political and
cultural contexts, and their relations to sites of transnational lawmaking. The regulatory
areas likewise vary from financial and business regulation to social and economic rights.
Most importantly, each of the studies builds from long-term empirical research projects
that engage with the interaction of transnational law and these countries.
Each of the studies is conducted within a systematic research design that examines
the interaction of transnational and national legal processes in particular regulatory
domains in different countries over time. Each study compares different countries’
responses in a single regulatory area (or in one case, that of Klug, a single country and
transnational/national interaction in two regulatory areas), so that the authors can
Transnational Legal Process and State Change 231
assess variation in transnational influence. Three of the studies entail fieldwork involv-
ing participant observation and extensive interviewing of relevant actors. The fourth
study (by Kim and Boyle) uses quantitative methods, together with an historical
analysis, to assess the relative impacts across over seventy low-income and middle-
income countries of conflicting human rights and neoliberal development norms over
a twenty-one-year period. Overall, the methods used include systematic interviewing,
participant/observation, ethnography, documentary evidence, archival research and
surveys, as well as (in one case) quantitative regression analysis.
This article conceptualizes and provides a map for studying what transnational
legal orders and legal processes do. It gives specific examples from the accompanying
studies to illuminate its points. Although the case studies in this volume focus primarily
on a range of developing countries, the analytic framework used and the dimensions of
change and factors assessed should apply across countries and regions, including the
United States and the European Union.1 The primary difference between the United
States and the European Union and the countries studied in this volume lies in the
general direction of transnational flows, with the United States and European Union
more likely being producers of transnational legal norms, as opposed to being appro-
priators of them. In a globalized world, much of law is subject to transnational influences
and pressures, but more powerful states are the primary exporters of legal norms.
This introductory framework article is in five parts. Part I defines and explains the
key concepts used: transnational law and legal norms, transnational legal process,
transnational legal orders, state change and transformations, and the recursivity of these
processes. Part II introduces the four studies. Part III sets forth and examines five
dimensions of change within states that transnational legal processes can spur—changes
in substantive law and practice (law); broader shifts in the boundary between the state,
the market and other forms of social ordering (the role of the state); changes in the
institutional architecture of the state (institutions); the shaping of markets for profes-
sional expertise and expertise’s role in governance (expertise); and shifts in normative
frames that are embedded in transnational accountability mechanisms and associational
patterns (normative frames).
Part IV maintains that variation in the impacts of transnational legal processes
should be assessed as function of three clusters of factors—the character of the transna-
tional legal norm and legal order in terms of their legitimacy, clarity, and coherence;
the relation of the transnational legal order to the receiving state in terms of power and
the place of intermediaries conveying the legal norm; and the domestic context of the
receiving state, and in particular the affinity of the transnational legal norm with
domestic demand in light of domestic political contests, institutions, legal culture, and
the extent of change at stake. These factors determine the extent and limits of tran-
snational law’s impact. Part V explains how national responses to transnational legal
processes, including in less powerful states, can spur reassessments of the transnational
legal norm in question, resulting in dynamic, recursive processes. We then conclude,
summarizing the main points and calling for further research on these questions across
countries and regulatory domains.
1. On the migration of foreign and international law into the United States and European Union,
respectively, see, for example, Resnik (2006, 2008); Scott (2009); Shaffer (2000).
I. THE CONCEPTS OF TRANSNATIONAL LAW, CHANGE,

TRANSFORMATION, AND RECURSIVITY
We first need to define and clarify the key concepts used in this article’s approach
to assessing transnational legal processes and state change in order to provide a map for
empirical study: those of transnational law, transnational legal norm, transnational legal
process, transnational legal orders, change, transformation, and recursivity. In other
words, this introductory article’s aim, to take from William Twining (2009, 107), is “to
provide concepts for asking questions, framing hypotheses and pursuing empirical
inquiries.”
A. Transnational Law, Legal Norms, Legal Process, and Legal Orders
Since the rise of sovereign states in the seventeenth century, associated conven-
tionally with the Treaty of Westphalia, law has been associated with state law and
national legal systems. Law, as John Glenn (2003, 839) writes, was “an essential
element . . . of national construction.” Public international law was based on and came
into existence with the creation of states, governing their relations and providing for
their mutual recognition. Private international law provides complementary rules and
standards to govern situations where more than one state asserts jurisdiction over a
transaction or event. The concepts of public and private international law are thus both
state centric, addressing relations between nation states and between national legal
systems.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spread of economic globalization, scholarly
work has increasingly applied new concepts of global law and transnational law but often
without clear conceptualizations of either. Under each of these two concepts, law is, to
a certain extent, being denationalized, since the legal norms may not be formally part
of international or national law as conventionally construed. Global law posits, by its
name, that universal legal norms are being created and diffused globally in different
legal domains that may or may not involve agreements between states (Boyle and Meyer
1998, 213–32; Braithwaite and Drahos 2000). The concept of transnational law has
been developed, in parallel, to address legal norms that do not clearly fall within
traditional conceptions of national and international law but are not necessarily global
in nature.
The concept of transnational law can be narrower or broader, depending on the
concept’s user, but it generally comprises legal norms that apply across borders to parties
located in more than one jurisdiction. Two examples of the transnationalization of law
that fall outside traditional conceptions of international law are the formation by
private actors of substantive law that applies across borders (such as lex mercatoria) and
the rise of common approaches of national judges and regulators to cross-border and
(purely) national legal and regulatory issues as a result of transjudicial and transgov-
ernmental regulatory dialogues.2 From a broader conception, transnational legal orders
2. See, e.g., Calliess & Zumbansen (201); Teubner (1996); Slaughter (2003). See also work on global
legal pluralism such as Berman (2007) and Benda-Beckmann & Benda-Beckmann (2006).
can subsume international law but also encompass legal rules and norms that have
effects across borders without any binding agreement among states, whether they are
created by international organizations, intergovernmental networks, or private actors,
and whether they are of a hard or soft law nature.
Although the term transnational law is increasingly used, authors are not always
careful in specifying what they mean by it. The use of the term can be distilled into two
conceptualizations differentiated by whether they focus on subjects (law addressing
transnational activities and situations) or on sources (law, whether international or
foreign, that is imported and exported across borders). Most legal studies that use the
term transnational law refer to law that targets transnational events and activities—
that is, transnational situations that involve more than one national jurisdiction.3 (We
dub this concept, Transnational Law Applying to Transnational Situations.) However,
many sociolegal studies, including those in this volume, conceive of transnational law
and legal norms in terms of the source of legal change within a national legal system. In
this latter conception, transnational law consists of legal norms that are exported and
imported across borders and that involve transnational networks and international and
regional institutions that help to construct and convey them. (We dub this concept,
Transnational Law as Transnational Construction and Flow of Legal Norms.)
In his famous 1956 Storrs Lecture, Judge Philip Jessup defined transnational law in
the first “situational” sense as “all law which regulates actions or events that transcend
national frontiers” (1956, 2). He stressed “[b]oth public and private international law
are included, as are other rules which do not wholly fit into such standard categories.”
This concept is a functional and practical one, reflecting a professional concern that,
since both international and national law are inadequate to address the flow of actions
and the impact of events across borders, we need a more accurate and useful concept to
govern these situations (Jessup 1956). The growing use of the concept of transnational
law, in this sense, reflects a functional legal response to increasing economic intercon-
nectedness. This interconnectedness sometimes involves new international treaties and
regimes, and sometimes involves the application of national law to events that occur
outside a state’s borders but have effects within it.
In an excellent conceptual analysis, Craig Scott (2009) examines three perspec-
tives of transnational law that lie within this first conception, which he labels tradi-
tionalist, decisional, and sociolegal. First, he notes that the concept of transnational
law, at a minimum, simply aggregates traditional concepts of public and private inter-
national law. Public international law addresses relations between states, while private
international law (in its traditional meaning) addresses conflicts between national
jurisdictions asserting authority over the transnational activities of private actors. These
private law situations give rise to the development of principles and rules regarding
conflicts of law, jurisdiction, and enforcement and recognition of judgments. Second, as
national courts and international arbitrators issue an increasing number of decisions to
address these situations, they create disaggregated clusters of principles and rules that
can be extracted, used by advocates, and guide subsequent decisions. Third, as a pool of
legal norms in this area becomes relatively coherent and systematized over time, we may
3. These studies build from the famous lectures of Jessup (1956). See, e.g., Koh (2004, 53) and
Slaughter (2000, 245).
discern the emergence of a distinct body of law that is not statist, but transnational, one
that is developed by the ongoing interaction of public and private actors across states,
including through international private law institutions.
The concept of Transnational Law as Transnational Construction and Flow of Legal
Norms, in contrast, focuses on the transnational production of legal norms and insti-
tutional forms and their migration across borders, regardless of whether they address
transnational activities or purely national ones. The concept includes legal norms that
are substantive and specific to discrete areas of law, and not just general principles of
jurisdiction and conflicts of law, nor only law applied to cross-border business transac-
tions. In other words, this conceptualization of transnational law comprehensively
includes public and private international law (with their traditional state-based focus)
as well as global law (with its universalist pretensions) and nonglobalized law that
applies to more than one state. Users of this concept tend to focus on the transnational
construction and migration of legal norms, by which we refer, for heuristic purposes, to
norms that lay out behavioral prescriptions issued by an authoritative source that take
written form, whether or not formally binding or backed by a dispute settlement or
other enforcement system.4 Transnational legal norms include those purported to be
global and those that are more limited in their reach. The source of the legal norm may
be an international treaty, international soft law, privately created codes or standards, a
foreign legal model promoted by transnational actors, or a combination of them.
This concept of Transnational Law as Transnational Construction and Flow of
Legal Norms is used to assess how law produced transnationally migrates across borders,
whether it is formally enacted by national legislatures, is directly applied by national
courts, shapes interpretation of existing domestic law, or otherwise affects private
behavior. The concept is not a doctrinal or functional one, but a sociolegal and
methodological one that is used to assess how transnationally induced legal change
occurs and what type of effects it has. The concept, in other words, does not aim to
delineate a particular body of law or legal doctrine but cuts across fields of law and
provides a means for assessing transnationally induced change in a globalized world. In
sum, these different conceptions of transnational law and legal norms are adopted
because they are useful for different purposes.
The two concepts have a clear overlap since the cross-border construction and flow
of legal norms is often catalyzed by cross-border activities and policy concerns (Fried-
man 1996). Yet, under this second conception of transnational law, the legal norms in
question address not only transnational activities, but also purely national ones. For
example, primary education law, studied by Kim and Boyle, is an exclusively national
activity, but it can be significantly shaped by the transnational construction and flow of
legal norms, whether human rights norms or neoliberal law and economics norms. The
transnational legal norms in question may be adopted voluntarily in a planned fashion
pursuant to harmonization efforts, or adopted without a plan as part of a process of
diffusion conveyed through transnational actors and interactions (Friedman 1996,
69–72; Twining 2005; Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett 2008). Regardless of the
4. This conception of legal norms is captured in the dichotomous conception of hard and soft law
along the dimensions of precision, obligation, and delegation in Abbot and Snidal (2000).
transnational source and nature of the legal norm, it is given force and effect when it
becomes embedded in a national legal system.
Harold Koh (2006, 745–46) captures this latter conception of transnational law, in
part, when he combines the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the transnational flow
of legal norms:
Perhaps the best operational definition of transnational law, using computer-age

imagery, is: (1) law that is “downloaded” from international to domestic law: for
example, an international law concept that is domesticated or internalized into
municipal law, such as the international human rights norm against disappearance,
now recognized as domestic law in most municipal systems; (2) law that is
“uploaded, then downloaded”: for example, a rule that originates in a domestic
legal system, such as the guarantee of a free trial under the concept of due process
of law in Western legal systems, which then becomes part of international law, as
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights, and from there becomes internalized into nearly every
legal system in the world; and (3) law that is borrowed or “horizontally trans-
planted” from one national system to another: for example, the “unclean hands”
doctrine, which migrated from the British law of equity to many other legal
systems.
Koh’s metaphors, while helpful in conveying the idea of transnational legal processes,
risk reducing their complexity since, in practice, the processes are multifold, simulta-
neous, and iterative, involving disparate actors, applications, and flows in multiple
directions. For some, the third example used by Koh broadens the analysis too far to
include all migrations of legal norms. In practice, however, there likely will be both
horizontal and vertical flows that constitute a transnational legal order so that this
concern should be limited. Transnational legal orders will build from national models;
national actors will deploy transnational networks and institutions as a means to export
and diffuse national legal norms. We thus define the concept of Transnational Law as
Transnational Construction and Flow of Legal Norms, for heuristic purposes, as law in
which transnational actors, be they institutions or networks of public or private actors, play a
role in constructing and diffusing legal norms, even if the legal norm is taken in large part
from a national legal model, such as a powerful state like the United States.
This article builds from Koh’s conception of transnational legal processes, while
aiming to improve the tools for empirically assessing their implications for state change
and the factors that explain its timing and extent. Critically for our purposes, Koh did
not provide a framework for assessing the conditions and factors determining the
extent, location, and limits of transnationally induced legal change. Likewise, he never
engaged in extensive empirical study of them. Moreover, he did not assess the source of
transnational legal norms and whether transnational legal norms reflect a structural tilt
in favor of some interests over others. In contrast, this article and the studies in this
volume “beam the searchlight of social science” on the transnational sources of legal
norms, their reception in countries, and the broader dimensions of state change that are
implicated.
A key concept for this project is that of transnational legal process, the process
through which the transnational construction and conveyance of legal norms takes
place. Transnational norms do not travel by themselves. They are constructed, con-
veyed, and carried by actors, including by government officials, members of interna-
tional secretariats, professionals, business representatives, and civil society activists.
Actors with agendas often drive these processes. At other times, the legal norms may be
carried less consciously as a reflection of intensified cross-border interaction character-
izing economic and cultural globalization.
Transnational legal processes occur differentially in particular legal areas, poten-
tially constituting distinct transnational legal orders that are semiautonomous. The
term transnational legal order is conceptualized as a collection of more or less codified
transnational legal norms and associated institutions within a given functional domain.
Where the transnational legal norms are relatively clear, coherent, and accepted in
practice, the transnational legal order is more salient and may be viewed in systematic
terms. Where they are less so, the transnational legal order is more contingent and
fragile, and thus, less likely to be effective in producing domestic legal and institutional
change. Over time, transnational legal processes can constitute transnational legal
orders through the ongoing articulation of legal norms and their application. Transna-
tional legal orders may arise in different areas of law, involving degrees of consensus and
coherence. They may include global, multilateral, regional, and bilateral norms and
institutions. They may encompass traditional international and supranational organi-
zations, transgovernmental regulatory networks, and the activities of transnational
corporate and civil society actors, whether or not working through formal institutions.
The existence of transnational legal orders may be reflected in treaties, nonbinding
standards, model codes, institutional monitoring, and different forms of monitoring and
dispute settlement. These instruments include amalgams of hard law and soft law
varying in their obligatory nature, precision, and institutionalization of monitoring,
peer review, and dispute settlement (Abbott and Snidal 2000).
The concept of transnational legal orders is similar to that of global administrative
orders used in the global administrative law project from the New York University
School of Law, although this project is different in ambition and scope. Both projects
depict legal orders arising beyond the nation-state that comprise not only international
organizations, but also bureaucratic networks of public officials, hybrid public-private
networks, and networks of purely private parties, creating hard and soft law rules and
norms (Kingsbury, Krisch, and Stewart 2005). The concept of transnational legal
orders, however, comprises more than administrative law principles and procedural
rules, and it includes substantive areas of law not traditionally touched by them such as
human rights trials. The concept of transnational legal order also does not (by its name)
imply that it has a global reach. Rather, the concept of discrete transnational legal
orders facilitates the analysis of both their heterogeneous nature and their variable
effects, which may sometimes be global in nature, but which are more likely to exhibit
considerable variation.
B. Change and Transformation
We need to specify what we mean by state change and transformation. First, in

terms of the state, for heuristic purposes, we refer to the Weberian conception of a state,
which wields formal authority, exercises compulsory jurisdiction, and monopolizes the
legitimate use of force within a territory (Tilly 1992, 2–4). Yet, at the same time, we
recognize that such a conception is an ideal type since state institutions exercise varying
amounts of actual authority. One must disaggregate the concept of the state in order to
assess empirically how the state changes over time. Moreover, the very concept of
transnational legal processes questions the idea of a state/global or state/transnational
dichotomy. As Saskia Sassen (2006, 3) shows, while the state remains central as a
political unit, and thus, central for purposes of sociolegal study, the state contributes to
its own change through its active collaboration with and enabling of transnational
forces.
As regards change and transformation, we need to clarify what they consist of and
what to look for in terms of the location and timing of change. Transnationally induced
change can affect the state generally or only discrete parts of the state (the location of
change) and is thus a “differentiated process” (Sassen 2007, 34). Change occurs along
different dimensions, such as legal, institutional, professional, and normative, which we
examine in Part III. Change can occur evolutionarily or revolutionarily, episodically,
incrementally, or dramatically (as in Eastern Europe in the 1990s). The concept of
transformation refers to significant or fundamental change, change that can vary in terms
of time and space (Campbell 2004). The threat of transformation of the state can lead
to a protracted politics both locally and transnationally to forestall change. Diachronic
empirical studies are thus important since we may not know the extent of change until
after some struggle, possibly a protracted one.
The extent of change is always contingent. At times, studies will speak of tran-
snational influence, at times of transnational failure, at times of appropriation of
transnational law, or at times of significant transnationally induced change. The result-
ing legal change may occur symbolically (on the books in terms of constitutional,
statutory and administrative law revisions, or the creation or modification of agencies
and courts) or practically (in terms of established patterns of institutional and individual
behavior). While much of traditional law scholarship focuses on the symbolic,5 the
studies in this volume address changes in not only formal law and institutional struc-
tures, but also institutional and social practice.
The effective importation of transnational legal norms and institutional forms
often confronts a dilemma. While importation is facilitated if the legal norm can be
translated and appropriated to fit the local context, the more that the norm is
adapted, the less transformative it may be. As Sally Merry (2006a, 222) writes regard-
ing human rights law and gender violence, legal norms “are more easily adapted if
they are packaged in familiar terms and do not disturb established hierarchies, but
they are more transformative if they challenge existing assumptions about power
relationships.” Because transnational law interacts with domestic institutional,
political, and cultural contexts, changes are often evolutionary and incremental over
time.
5. See, e.g., Watson (1974, 20) (“our first concern will be with the existence of the rule, not with how
it operates within the society as a result of academic or judicial interpretation”).
C. Transnational Legal Process and Nonlegal Factors in State Change
There are, of course, many transnational impacts besides law on nation-states,

reflecting processes of economic and cultural globalization and global structures of
political and economic power. Many earlier studies have examined these transnational
impacts, and in particular, the phenomena of economic and cultural globalization (Held
1999; Sorensen 2004; Campbell 2004; Leibfried and Zürn 2005; Sassen 2006, 2007). Of
course, these larger political, economic, and social forces affect transnational law.
Transnational law reflects and conveys them, embodying and institutionalizing values,
norms, and prescriptions for social organization and behavior. It is thus difficult, if not
impossible, to separate the impacts of law from other forces, and the accompanying
studies do not attempt to do so.6
However one views the relation of transnational law to larger processes of global-
ization and the exercise of power, the focus on transnational legal norms and legal
process provides us with a vehicle for assessing transnational influences on state change.
Transnational legal norms embody prescriptions for the regulation of activities in
particular functional domains. They can shape the perception and definition of prob-
lems and appropriate responses to them. They provide a framework for actors to weigh
particular regulatory alternatives to address particular situations. They make available
models for reshaping institutional arrangements for the development, application, and
enforcement of law to address these situations.
To understand change in regulatory fields requires an assessment of “the various
processes by which institutions are continually reproduced and modified through . . .
actors’ practices” (Koslowski and Kratchowil 1994, 227). Transnational legal processes
engage relevant actors in an iterative process of interaction that can affect their
practices, leading to incremental or more dramatic change. The study of transnational
legal processes thus provides a window for assessing changes in legal norms, institutional
organization, and practices within states.
D. Recursivity
The sociolegal approach represented in this volume combines the examination of

transnational and national processes by focusing inquiry on particular regulatory fields,
as opposed to general global and transnational law principles. In this way, the studies
can assess how the transnational and national are interpenetrated within a field. This
dual focus is captured in the concept of recursivity, developed by Terence Halliday and
Bruce Carruthers (2007, 2009). Recursivity connotes a multidirectional, diachronic
process of legal change. From this perspective, transnational legal process is viewed not
as unidirectional, but as a process in which the transnational and local are held in
tension, the actors engaged in transnational legal processes seek to influence local
lawmaking and practice, and the national legal norms, adaptations, and resistances
provide models for and feed back into transnational lawmaking.
6. On the vigorous debates about legal autonomy and its limits, see Cotterrell (1992, 44–65).
This conception of transnational legal process as recursive does not reify it as

singular and absolute in content, but rather accounts for its historical specificity and
provisional and changing nature. Some sort of legal settlement may occur that persists
over time until that settlement is destabilized. Thus, transnational legal process is not
reduced to a process of filling in gaps in law’s implementation, but rather seen in
dynamic terms in which national, international, and transnational political, social, and
legal processes interact. The recursivity approach posits that changes and transforma-
tions of states will be a function of three processes operating concurrently and
cyclically—a politics within international and transnational processes; a politics within
domestic processes; and a politics between them involving intermediaries, as we
examine in Part IV.
II. THE FOUR CASE STUDIES
Before we lay out a typology for the study of the dimensions of state change and the
conditions and factors determining the location, extent, and limits of state change, we
introduce the four case studies in greater detail so that we may refer to them as
illustrations for conceptual points throughout this article.
Terrence Halliday’s study, Architects of the State: International Organizations and the
Reconstruction of States in East Asia (2011), examines the role of international organi-
zations in restructuring corporate bankruptcy law in East Asia, focusing on China,
Korea and Indonesia. He starts by noting how “doggedly nationalistic” were the United
States and England in initially developing and reforming their national models for
bankruptcy in the 1970s and 1980s. These models provided templates for the creation
of global bankruptcy law norms promoted by international institutions. He examines
how international and regional financial institutions and, eventually, the UN Commis-
sion on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) drew from these national models in
light of three sets of pivotal events: the fall of the Berlin Wall, a series of debt crises
affecting pivotal developing and transitional economies, and the Asian financial crisis
at the end of the 1990s. Clubs of nations, in particular the G-7 and G-22, with the
United States playing a particularly influential role, first instructed the international
financial institutions to develop norms and create regulatory frameworks to address
national credit crises more systematically and protect the global financial system. In the
post-Washington consensus, the international financial institutions stressed the role of
law and institutions, such as courts and regulatory agencies, as critical for effective
policy, together with trained professionals who service them. International institutions
worked with international professional associations of insolvency practitioners, includ-
ing the International Bar Association, to draw from their expertise in consolidating a
model set of insolvency norms and practices adopted through UNCITRAL.
Halliday assesses the broader implications that these globalized legal norms raise
within states, and, in particular, the institutional architecture of states, including the
relative roles of executive departments, independent agencies, legislatures, and courts. In
Indonesia, in the midst of the financial crisis, the international financial institutions used
their leverage to spur not only substantive and procedural legal reforms, but also the
creation of entirely new state institutions, including a new Commercial Court that would
be responsible for corporate bankruptcies, and an out-of-court agency for negotiations

between debtors and creditors. In Korea, the state shifted power over corporate insol-
vency from executive departments to courts, which included functional equivalents of a
US model of a specialized bankruptcy court. In China, the government adopted a law that
outsources significant functions for the restructuring of companies to courts and private
professionals, adopting global insolvency norms enunciated by the World Bank and
UNCITRAL, albeit along China’s timeline. Halliday nonetheless shows how the tran-
snational promotion of legal and institutional reform, although seemingly technical,
raise fundamental issues of state restructuring that implicate power configurations within
states and spur resistance to change. This resistance gives rise to recursive cycles of
transnational and domestic lawmaking until some sort of settlement is reached.
Heinz Klug’s study, Access to Medicines and the Transformation of the South Africa
State (2011), addresses the constraints and opportunities provided by international and
transnational intellectual property and competition law in postapartheid South Africa.
He notes how the transformation of South Africa was made in the context of oppor-
tunities and constraints created by international and transnational law and institutions,
affecting competing political and economic factions within the postapartheid state,
with some policy options gaining salience while others were foregone. On the one hand,
he examines the interaction of the relative power of global and transnational institu-
tions and models, but, on the other hand, he discusses the confluence of local condi-
tions and tensions among domestic policy sectors in light of domestic social problems.
This interaction results in nonlinear and uneven processes of state change.
Klug assesses how the new postapartheid government came into power at the time
of the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and inherited the commit-
ments made by the previous regime. The bureaucracy within the government empha-
sized that South African law had long protected patents and contended that the new
WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS
Agreement) raised no significant issues for the country. The new health department,
composed of activists of the African National Congress, felt otherwise and found a
transnational ally in the World Health Organization. While competition law initially
did not receive significant attention in South Africa, South Africa joined the Interna-
tional Competition Network in 2001 and strengthened its competition law institutions.
It used these institutions and legal tools to address high levels of business concentration
in South Africa, including in the pharmaceutical sector. Klug shows how the govern-
ment and activists were able to use competition law norms to advance the government’s
Black Economic Empowerment goals and challenge the drug pricing practices of phar-
maceutical companies. In other words, transnational legal norms were appropriated to
advance domestic aims.
Maira Machado’s study, Similar in Their Differences: Transnational Legal Processes
Addressing Money Laundering in Brazil and Argentina (2011), assesses the development of
transnational legal norms regarding money laundering and the reasons for their variable
impacts within Brazil and Argentina. The transnational process started with US pro-
motion of anti-money laundering norms within the Basel Committee on Banking
Supervision, an institution created by the Central Bank governors of ten nations,
moved to the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) created by the G-7, and then
encompassed the United Nations. The Basel Committee first adopted a relatively
general statement of ethical principles for banks in 1998. In 1990, the FATF prepared
more precise guidelines in the form of Forty Recommendations on money laundering,
which are not formally binding, although many states consider them to be de facto
binding if they are to remain in good standing before the FATF. The FATF recommen-
dations and its reporting, monitoring, and peer-review processes create new forms of
accountability not only for government bureaucrats, but also for private financial
institutions that must oversee and report on their customers’ transactions. In 2002 and
2003, the FATF recommendations became incorporated in two UN conventions that
are formally binding, one against transnational organized crime and one against the
financing of terrorism.
Machado’s study assesses the variable impacts of the FATF’s recommendations on
anti-money laundering in Brazil and Argentina. While Brazil was certainly subject to
transnational pressure, it also implemented the FATF recommendations for domestic
policy reasons. In contrast, the changes in Argentina have been largely reactions to
transnational pressure and have had, as a result, less impact in practice. Machado shows
how the Brazilian government found the FATF’s policies useful for addressing the
national problems of organized crime and corruption and their threat to the state, while
there was little domestic demand in Argentina to implement them. The Brazilian state
criminalized money laundering, and it created a new financial intelligence unit within
the administration and a new interagency coordination and monitoring mechanism
(named ENCCLA) pursuant to which authorities interact over money laundering
initiatives for the first time. It also obligated financial institutions to identify customers,
maintain records, and report on suspicious transactions, enlisting them as policing
agents, and it created a new Internet-based process (named BacenJud), which facilitates
the exchange of financial information between financial institutions and judicial
authorities. The result has been the creation of new hybrid public-private financial
policing mechanisms and an overall shift in allocation of institutional authority from
the judicial branch to the administration.
The study by Minzee Kim and Elizabeth Boyle, Neoliberalism, Transnational Edu-
cation Norms, and Education Spending in the Developing World, 1983–2004 (2011), exam-
ines the relative impact on primary education policy of competing transnational
regimes. One regime is composed of international human rights treaties that recognize
a human right to free primary education, and relatively weak international institutions
that promote its compulsory, universal provision. The authors trace the development of
this legal regime, starting with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
followed by the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
and the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. These treaties are monitored and
promoted by international organizations, such as UNESCO, and transnational non-
governmental organizations (NGOs). The other regime is composed of international
financial institutions, which, in the 1980s and early 1990s, called for the adoption
of market-oriented user fees for the funding of education. The international financial
institutions emphasized free market principles, reductions in state spending, and bal-
anced budgets as part of a neoliberal approach to development. When developing
countries faced debt crises, the international financial institutions exercised consider-
able leverage, and in particular the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World
Bank through structural adjustment agreements and adjacent instruments, which
imposed de jure and de facto loan conditionalities. The IMF and World Bank signed
these agreements with numerous states, building from a common template of prescrip-
tions. The agreements fall within traditional conceptions of neither national nor
international law, but are clearly transnational in character and implicate large numbers
of countries. By 2000, according to a World Bank report, seventy-seven of seventy-nine
countries studied had adopted some type of user fee for primary education.
The authors show that despite the relatively weak position of the human rights
regime compared to the coercive power of international financial institutions, the
international human rights regime’s approach to universal primary education has won
out. The World Bank backed down and then denied that it had actually advocated user
fees to fund children’s education. The authors contend that it was the power of the
greater legitimacy of the human rights regime, coupled with the activity of transna-
tional NGOs, which led to its success. Using data at yearly intervals for over seventy
poor- and middle-income countries between 1983 and 2004, they show that the key
factor in determining countries’ per capita expenditure on education for children under
fourteen and their percentage of state expenditure devoted to education was neither the
ratification of human rights treaties nor the implementation of structural adjustment
agreements. Rather, countries embedded in the transnational human rights regime
through stronger linkages with transnational nongovernmental organizations were sig-
nificantly more likely to increase their per capita educational spending on children and
increase their relative spending on education. These transnational nongovernmental
organizations operate as crucial intermediaries for the conveyance of international
human rights norms regarding state expenditure on children’s education. In sum, the
authors find that transnational NGOs were central to the resolution of the contest
among competing transnational norms for primary education as well as for national
acceptance of the ideas promoted by the international human rights regime.
III. THE DIMENSIONS OF STATE CHANGE
To assess the impact of transnational legal processes on state change, we need to

distinguish between different dimensions of change. Besides shaping the substance of
national law, transnational legal processes can have broader effects on the institutions
and actors that apply law and the normative frames in which they do so.
This section provides a typology of five dimensions of state change affected by
transnational legal processes that can be assessed empirically. These dimensions are
summarized in Table 1, together with the academic disciplines often associated with
their study. The listing of the associated disciplines highlights both the stakes impli-
cated by transnational legal processes and the need for cross-disciplinary sociolegal
study of these implications.
The first dimension—changes in national law and practice—the focus of most
legal studies—implicates the other four, which raises deeper structural and normative
issues, and thus brings to the foreground the stakes of transnationally induced legal
change. The second and third dimensions involve shifts in the authority and architec-
ture of state institutions, while the fourth and fifth involve shifts in professional
expertise and normative frames. These dimensions are interlinked, since changes in one
TABLE 1.
The Dimensions of State Change
Dimensions of State Change Associated Discipline
(1) Changes in national law and practice Focus of Legal Studies

(2) Changes in the boundary of the state, the market, and Focus of Institutional Economics
other forms of social ordering
(3) Changes in the allocation of authority among state Focus of Comparative Institutional
institutions Analysis in Comparative Politics
(4) Changes in markets for expertise and the role of Focus of Sociology of the
expertise in governance Professions
(5) Shifts in normative frames embedded in new mechanisms Focus of Critical Sociology and
of accountability and associational patterns Organizational Sociology
dimension can catalyze changes in others. It is nonetheless useful to disaggregate these

dimensions for purposes of empirical study of the impacts and implications of transna-
tional legal processes.
A. Changing National Law: Enactment and Practice
To start with the traditional focus of legal scholarship, transnational legal processes
can trigger changes across the spectrum of national law. They trigger changes in
constitutional law, with new and amended constitutions incorporating new human
rights (Elkins, Ginsburg, & Simmons forthcoming). They induce changes in criminal
law, broadening its scope to address, for example, money laundering and copyright and
trademark violations (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000; Machado 2011). They spur
changes across regulatory fields (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000). National laws, from
South Africa to China, incorporate by reference standards developed by international
standard-setting bodies, for example (Büthe and Mattli 2011). These processes can
potentially lead to a “race to the top,” a “race to the bottom,” or ongoing divergence in
regulatory stringency (Vogel and Kagan 2004, 31). Actors, of course, are behind these
processes, and determine their relative success, as we assess in Part IV.
Formal legal change can provide tools for actors to effect change in regulatory
outcomes over time, but they do not necessarily do so. The studies in this volume
address both the formal enactment and practical implementation of law but focus their
attention on how transnationally spurred legal changes are applied (or thwarted) in
practice, including because legal norms can directly diffuse through judicial and admin-
istrative practice, without any formal enactment.
B. Changing the Boundary of the State, the Market, and Other Forms of
Social Ordering
Transnationally induced legal change can have broader systemic effects within
states. Transnational legal processes provide legal rules and models that reconfigure the
respective roles of the state, the market, and other forms of social ordering. They can
affect the allocation of authority between public and private law such as the public law
of the administrative state and the private law of contract, social practice, and the
interaction between them (Shaffer 2009). They can signal and call for the state to do
more or to do less. In some cases, the state devolves or outsources previous state
functions; in others it takes on new responsibilities; in yet others it creates new
public-private hybrid models of governance. These shifts involve both the state’s direct
engagement in economic production (reflected in privatization initiatives) and the
state’s regulation of production (reflected in regulatory and deregulatory policies).
Transnational legal processes induce states to assume responsibilities traditionally
left to other forms of social ordering in some policy areas. The study of Kim and Boyle
examines how transnational hard and soft law policies have pressed developing coun-
tries to assume responsibility for providing free, universal primary education, increasing
state expenditures in this domain. Klug highlights the transnational human rights
pressures on the state to fund greater access to essential medicines. Machado’s study
documents the growth of state financial regulation and, in particular, the spurring of
greater intervention of the criminal justice system over financial transactions so that
financial privacy is reduced.
In other areas, however, transnational legal models have promoted shifts away
from state administration toward privatization, deregulation, and greater regulatory
flexibility, reflecting neoliberal policies following the collapse of the socialist model
after the Cold War. Binding rules of the WTO have significantly constrained state
regulatory choices over trade, intellectual property, and industrial policy. Transnational
legal processes also operate in diffuse ways, leading to the outsourcing of functions
traditionally performed by state institutions. Halliday’s study, for example, explains the
shift toward private professionals and courts for corporate reorganizations in Korea and
China. These changes were respectively promoted by transnational epistemic commu-
nities of consultants and practitioners consisting of public and private actors working
out of or in coordination with international and regional financial institutions.
Where the state outsources traditional government responsibilities, state institu-
tions do not leave the scene. Rather, the state often shifts toward steering mechanisms,
working through public-private hybrids and other governance mechanisms (Rhodes
1996). Outsourcing the provision of services to private entities simultaneously gives
rise to new public agencies, new regulation, and new forms of dispute settlement in
areas traditionally monopolized by the state. David Levi-Faur (2005) has traced the
proliferation of functional regulatory agencies around the world in areas where none
existed before, documenting the growth of material competencies of the state involv-
ing increased specialization and diversification of state administrations. Policy makers
often introduce new governance concepts of benchmarking, soft law, information
exchange, and best practices. Transnationally created indicators report on state prac-
tices and their effects, informing countries’ regulatory strategies (Davis, Kingsbury, and
Merry 2011).
While the concept of transnational law could suggest a conceptual link to the
literature on the retreat of the state (Ohmae 1995; Strange 1996; Glenn 2003), the state
is arguably not retreating so much as being reshaped (Campbell 2004; Sorensen 2004;
Leibfried and Zürn 2005). Transnational legal processes have promoted particular
structures for a market economy, shifting the boundary between the market, the state,
and other forms of social ordering, affecting what the state does. These shifts can
potentially have deep social repercussions over time.
C. Changing the Institutional Architecture of the State
Transnational legal processes affect not only what the state does; they shift allo-
cations of authority among the state institutions that make, apply, and enforce law,
whether they be more centralized or decentralized, and whether they involve different
branches of government or different levels of government (Kelemen 2004). These
shifts can incite struggles between state institutions reluctant to cede or eager to gain
power.
It is frequently argued that the expansion of international and transnational
governance has empowered executives, leaving legislatures to rubber stamp the results
of international negotiations (Richardson 2001, 94–95). Such shifts of institutional
authority within states have indeed occurred in many domains, spurring analysis regard-
ing how to reempower legislatures (Slaughter 2003, 1056). Yet, legislatures can also be
strengthened and executives weakened by transnational legal processes. In many coun-
tries, the executive branch’s discretion has been reduced, and the parliament’s power
enhanced, compared to allocations of power under state-development models of eco-
nomic growth in which power was concentrated in executive branch bureaucracies
(Pistor and Wellon 1999). Halliday discusses these shifts in his study of transformations
of bankruptcy law in Asia. The executive’s authority is similarly curtailed when regu-
latory power is delegated to independent agencies operating at greater remove from
political institutions.
Transnational legal processes can also affect the role of courts within national
systems, sometimes providing courts with new leverage to increase their authority in
relation to executives. Courts have been traditionally weak in many developing
countries, but transnational legal processes provide them with new tools to assert
themselves. Klug shows how judges have been empowered to force the hand of state
bureaucrats regarding state-provided medical treatment. Halliday notes the enhance-
ment of judicial power over corporate bankruptcy in South Korea, as well as its
potential in China and Indonesia. Yet, transnational legal processes can also shift
authority away from courts and allocate power to executive branches in deference to
international agreements or to independent agencies because of perceived failures of
courts. National administrations, for example, have asserted new authority over crimi-
nal justice policy in relation to judicial authorities in the area of money laundering, as
shown in Machado’s study.
Transnational legal processes, in other words, promote new architectures of the
state. They provide rules and models for the creation of entirely new state institutions
and the reconfiguration of relations among existing ones. These institutional changes
can exhibit isomorphism across states, although the actual practices of these institutions
may vary considerably (Meyer, Boli, Thomas, and Ramirez 1997; Boyle and Meyer
1998). The direction of changes in institutional authority within states, and what drives
these changes, calls for ongoing empirical work.
D. Shaping Markets for Professional Expertise and Expertise’s

Role in Governance
In spurring the enactment of new law and the reconfiguration of state institu-
tions, transnational legal processes give rise to new professional specializations and
shifts in professional authority, creating incentives for individuals and institutions to
adjust to them. These developments can trigger changes toward more technocratic
forms of governance and away from other forms of authority, such as representative
government. They enhance the prospect of experts exercising authority and create
incentives for individuals and institutions to invest in expertise in specialized areas.
New professions develop; professional markets are shaped; existing career paths adapt
to new opportunities. Individuals, and in particular, elites in societies, invest in them
to gain or retain material welfare, social capital, and authority (Dezalay and Garth
2002).
These domestic shifts in governance occur within state institutions, in private
ordering, and in public-private hybrid forms of governance. State restructurings unleash
competition for new expertise when the state regulates new activities, creating new
positions within the state. They also do so when the state outsources traditional
governmental tasks. New private governance regimes have law-like features and
demand the services of professionals (Nonet and Selznick [1978] 2001; Meidinger 2009;
Calliess and Zumbansen 2010). These professionals monitor business behavior and state
institutional practice in light of transnational law and state adaptations to it (Machado
2011). In turn, when these individuals invest in professional expertise, they have stakes
in supporting particular national legal and institutional changes. In other words, this
dimension of state change interacts with other dimensions, both responding to state
institutional changes and spurring them.
The accompanying studies depict the development of new specializations in the
fields of bankruptcy law, anti-money laundering law, intellectual property law, and
competition law. New professional expertise has developed for bankruptcy services in
Asia (embracing lawyers, accountants, and insolvency specialists), as shown by Halli-
day. Likewise, Machado shows how private actors perform new functions in policing
financial transactions for money laundering, on account of new obligations to report
suspicious behavior to authorities, resulting in new hybrid public-private governance
models for financial regulation. Intellectual property and competition law are growing
fields of specialization in South Africa, India, and Brazil, creating new vested interests,
and shifting industry orientations.
Individuals who invest in such expertise play important roles in national gover-
nance in specialized domains. These individuals serve as conduits for the conveyance,
adaptation, and potential embedding of transnational legal norms, as we explore further
in Part IV.
E. Shifting Accountability Mechanisms and Normative Frames
Transnational legal processes generate shifts in patterns of association and mecha-

nisms of accountability, which convey particular normative frames. Individuals and
groups inside and outside of government account to institutions outside of national

borders. They form new patterns of association through ongoing interaction. New
relations of authority develop. The normative frames that are reflected in these
accountability mechanisms and associational patterns can affect loyalties, influence
legal understanding and practice, and reshape the legal culture and legal consciousness
of elites and (potentially) broader publics, the way they “conceive of the ‘natural’ and
normal way of doing things, their habitual patterns of talk and action, and their
commonsense understanding of the world” (Merry 1990, 5).
A primary transnational accountability mechanism consists of monitoring, sur-
veillance, and reporting obligations, which trigger peer pressure. International orga-
nizations directly monitor national processes, governments must report to them, and
these reports are formally reviewed. WTO members, for example, report to a series of
WTO committees and councils on their compliance with WTO trade and intellectual
property commitments. Those reports are prepared and evaluated within the norma-
tive frame of WTO rules. The FATF monitors compliance with financial disclosure
requirements, creating new forms of accountability not only for government bureau-
crats, but also for private financial institutions that oversee and report on their cus-
tomers’ transactions (Machado 2011. The Committee on the Rights of the Child
monitors compliance with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, harnessing
input from both government officials and NGOs (Kim and Boyle 2011). Transnational
indicators increasingly define and measure what constitutes appropriate national goals
and effective strategies, facilitating further monitoring (Davis, Kingsbury, and Merry
2011).
National institutions are created and developed to respond to these accountability
demands. Governmental agencies and civil society organizations receive resources
through technical assistance and capacity-building programs. Sometimes new national
agencies are designed and even staffed by consultants from transnational institutions.
Over time, new associational communities form as “clubs” in functionally disaggregated
legal areas.
These processes have implications for how state representatives and civil society
organizations view themselves and their roles, as they mediate relations between tran-
snational and national sites of governance. Transnational networks engage national
policy makers within particular normative frames. They can shape elite perspectives on
the appropriate role of institutions such as markets, independent agencies, and courts.
Local claims are viewed in transnational context.
These shifts in patterns of association and mechanisms of accountability with their
accompanying normative frames can shape the identities and subjectivities of elites and
potentially (over time) of broader publics. They can, in the process, affect the legal
consciousness and legal culture of elites and broader publics, influencing the demands
that elites and publics put on the state, leading to pressure on other dimensions of state
change, such as the boundary between the state, market, and other forms of social
ordering, and the allocation of institutional authority within the state. Once more, we
see how these different dimensions of state change interact.
Transnational legal processes operate, however, in the context of ongoing institu-
tional path dependencies, social histories, and domestic contests over national law and
policy, factors mediating the extent of state change to which we now turn.
IV. THE FACTORS EXPLAINING THE LOCATION, EXTENT, AND

LIMITS OF STATE CHANGE
To understand the impact of transnational legal processes on state change, we

need to specify the factors that explain its location, timing, and extent. The results of
transnational legal processes are not homogeneous. This section provides a typology of
three clusters of factors that determine the impact of transnational legal process, which
are enumerated in Table 2. Each of these factors can be isolated for purposes of subse-
quent study, but the purpose here is to provide an overall framework regarding the
factors that shape the limits of state change.
The first cluster of factors concerns the transnational legal order; the second cluster
the relation of the transnational legal order and the receiving state; and the third cluster
the context of the receiving state. The studies in this volume illustrate how these
clusters of factors operate and interact in different fields, affecting the location, extent,
timing, and limits of state change.
These three clusters of factors can be broken down into different components.
To start with transnational law and legal orders, the ways in which they vary can be
assessed in terms of three key aspects: (1) the legitimacy of the transnational legal
order which contributes to its power; (2) the clarity of the transnational legal norm;
and (3) the coherence of the transnational legal norm in reflection of whether
different transnational legal orders complement or are in tension with each other.
Collectively, the legitimacy, clarity, and coherence of the transnational legal norm
affect its impact.
TABLE 2.
The Explanatory Factors that Determine State Change
Three Clusters of Factors Components within Each Cluster
The Nature of the Transnational Legal (i) Legitimacy of the Transnational Legal Order and
Order and Norm Norm
(ii) The Clarity of the Transnational Legal Norm
(iii) The Coherence of the Transnational Legal Order
and Norm
(iv) Ability to Harness Historic Events
The Relation of the Transnational Legal (i) Power asymmetries and the receiving state
Order and the Receiving State (ii) Role of intermediaries
The Context of the Receiving State (i) Domestic demand
(ii) Domestic configurations of power
(iii) Domestic institutional capacities and path
dependencies
(iv) Domestic cultural frames
(v) Extent of change at stake
A. The Character of the Transnational Legal Order and Legal Norm:

Legitimacy, Clarity, and Coherence
1. The Relation of a Transnational Legal Order’s Power to Its Legitimacy
Scholars from various disciplines increasingly have engaged with the concept of
legitimacy in evaluating the impacts of international law and institutions (Halliday,
Block-Lieb, and Carruthers 2009). Legitimacy, as used in a sociological sense, refers to
the subjective belief of actors that a rule or institution should be obeyed (Suchman
1995). The concept of transnational law’s legitimacy is thus a relational one, since it
depends on whether actors regard the institutions and processes that promulgate and
convey it as “rightful,” and thus, authoritative (Hurd 2008, 2007). Where there are
political and social struggles over regulatory norms, law plays a mediating role, and
actors attempt to use law strategically to advance their aims through harnessing law’s
potential legitimating power.
A transnational legal order’s legitimacy can be assessed along three dimensions in
terms of inputs (who participates in a process), throughputs (the quality of procedural
fairness and deliberation characterizing such process), and outputs (how a process
substantively responds to a problem). Overall, national actors are more likely to per-
ceive transnational law to be legitimate where the law is formulated by actors who share
their interests, where the process is procedurally fair and characterized by noncoercive
reasoned argument, and where the results are functionally efficacious. The perception of
the legitimacy of a transnational legal process should vary along these three dimensions
of representativeness, procedural fairness, and effectiveness.
Legitimation is an aspect of power, and neither legality nor legitimacy should be
viewed in contradistinction to power as in some conceptions in the legal literature.
Transnational legal orders exercise power through mechanisms of coercion, reciproc-
ity, persuasion, and acculturation (Ginsburg and Shaffer 2010). Stated in other terms,
states and nonstate actors may adopt or otherwise adapt to transnational law because
they are coerced to do so, they find it to be in their self-interest through an exchange
or through persuasion, or they are normatively induced to comply with it in light of
its perceived legitimacy (Hurd 2007). Those scholars who focus on the role of sanc-
tions highlight law’s coercive aspects. Yet, law also exercises considerable power (if not
its greatest power) through normative processes in which law is accepted as legitimate
because it reflects norms of proper social behavior (Tyler 1990). Of course, these
mechanisms are ideal types, and in practice, they interrelate, affect, and build upon
each other.
These mechanisms all depend in different ways on legitimacy. Sanctions are more
likely to be effective if the relevant transnational legal order is accepted as legitimate,
and thus, authoritative. Where transnational legal orders are perceived to be legitimate,
they also can facilitate dialogue leading to persuasion as well as to reciprocal exchange.
Mechanisms of acculturation directly depend on a transnational legal order’s perceived
legitimacy.
Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall have provided a useful framework of four
conceptions of power in international governance, which they label as agency, institu-
tional, structural, and productive power (2005). Each of these conceptions applies to
the assessment of transnational legal processes and their effects, and each has implica-
tions for understanding the way legitimation operates in these processes. First, from an
agency perspective of power, actors have variable resources that affect their ability to
shape and mobilize transnational law (Dahl 1968). They likewise have variable
resources to deploy offers of rewards and threats of sanctions to induce third parties to
comply with it. Since actors have stakes in the perception of transnational law’s
legitimacy, they have incentives to mobilize resources to legitimize or delegitimize
transnational law and legal processes. Powerful players, such as the United States, are
typically best positioned to use transnational institutions and legal processes to legiti-
mize policies that they want, as well as to delegitimize the emergence of transnational
legal norms that go against their interests.
Second, from an institutional perspective, transnational institutions shape the type of
issues and arguments that parties may effectively raise (Bachrach and Baratz 1962).
International institutions and transnational policy networks structure choices, and they
do so especially for less powerful states. They provide frames that structure deliberation
over the conceptions of problems, their diagnoses, and strategies to address them.
Institutional power is more likely to be effective where institutional processes are
accepted as legitimate, whether from the perspective of input (participation), through-
put (deliberation), or output (material results). Actors invest in international institu-
tions, in part, because of the legitimation they can provide (Franck 1990).
Third, from a structural perspective, transnational legal orders create structures that
can materially advantage some over others, and, in the process, affect actor’s under-
standings of their interests (Lukes 1974). Transnational legal orders can materially
affect how actors calculate the costs and benefits of alternative policies and ideationally
affect such actors’ perceptions of the worth of pursuing or even conceiving of such
alternatives. Fourth, from a productive (or constitutive) perspective, social discourse and
knowledge systems can shape actors’ subjective understandings of their identities and
their capacities (Foucault 1984; Guizzini 2000). Transnational legal orders propagate
certain conceptions of identity and choice with the result that state and nonstate actors
are more likely to accept a given order as normal and inevitable. Although these latter
conceptions of power do not focus on actors, those able to benefit from these forms of
power, through the legitimation that transnational legal norms can provide, are in
privileged positions.
These latter conceptions of power find their reflections in the transnational legal
process theories within the legal academy of Harold Koh, Ryan Goodman, and Derek
Jinks, who are generally positive in their assessments of these processes. Koh (1998,
642) contends that “[r]epeated participation in the transnational legal process . . . helps
to reconstruct the national interests of the participating nations.” He (1629) sees
“transnational legal process” as “seeking to shape and transform personal identity”
so that political elites and broader societies “internalize” international law norms.
Similarly, Goodman and Jinks (2004) analyze acculturation processes through which
states are socialized without reflecting if the norms they adopt are in their interests.
Where transnational legal processes are accepted as legitimate, they are more likely to
shape actors’ interests and identities, and thus, have transformative effects.
The studies in this volume commonly highlight how the power of transnational
law’s perceived legitimacy exercises considerable influence in affecting domestic legal
change, and how coercion is less successful when an international regime’s legitimacy is
challenged. International financial institutions, for example, were successful in using
their coercive financial leverage during the Asian financial crisis to press Indonesia to
enact bankruptcy law reforms, as shown in Halliday’s study. However, these formal
changes were not implemented in a way that changed outcomes in the directions or
degree that the IMF anticipated. In contrast, UNCITRAL has exercised much greater
authority in national bankruptcy law reform efforts because the processes of represen-
tative deliberation, which gave rise to its model rules and legislative guides, are deemed
more legitimate. The national actors who participate in the UNCITRAL process take
home models, which they had a voice in drafting and approving, models that can
become part of a more indigenous national agenda to enhance financial stability and
economic development. Similarly, Kim and Boyle’s study shows how the World Bank’s
structural adjustment policies initially pressed developing countries to shift toward
requiring user fees for primary education (with seventy-seven of seventy-nine countries
studied for a World Bank report having adopted some type of user fee for primary
education by 2000). However, these efforts were rebuked following challenges to their
legitimacy by nongovernmental actors, pressing the World Bank to revise its policies
(Kim and Boyle 2011).
2. Variation in Transnational Law’s Hard and Soft Law Nature and the
Coherence of Transnational Legal Orders
The nature of transnational law varies in terms of different features that affect its
authority. Variations in the features of transnational legal norms have been conceptu-
alized in terms of hard and soft law, which contrast across the dimensions of obligation,
precision, delegation of monitoring, rule elaboration, and interpretation to a third-party
decision maker (Abbott and Snidal 2000). Such variations can affect a legal norm’s
clarity. Where a transnational legal norm is clearer and less ambiguous, there is less
room for significant variation at the domestic level when it is formally adopted. Simi-
larly, where a transnational legal norm is elaborated over time through delegated
dispute settlement, or through different forms of delegated monitoring, peer review, and
reporting, these processes can enhance the legal norm’s clarity (Sandholtz and Sweet
2004). It is striking, for example, how competition law in South Africa, for which there
are no binding international law obligations, have developed in a more indigenous
manner than patent law, which is subject to the binding rules of the WTO TRIPS
Agreement. Although precise legal norms may be ignored or evaded, and vague legal
norms can be applied in similar ways, clearer legal norms providing unambiguous signals
regarding the legal change sought will provide better tools to local actors at the stage of
domestic implementation of the legal norm. Overall, the more that a transnational legal
norm is clear, binding, and its meaning is interpreted, elaborated, and applied by a third
party regarding particular contexts, the more compelling its signal should be to states
and other constituencies. Actors promote these features in order to enhance the impact
of transnational law.
Transnational legal orders, however, can also complement or conflict with each
other, affecting transnational law’s coherence (Raustiala and Victor 2004, 279;
International Law Commission 2006; Shaffer and Pollack 2010). Different transna-
tional legal orders can address a single regulatory question. Where they complement
each other, their leverage can increase. Where they conflict, transnational legal norms
may be in tension, or even contradictory, affecting their overall coherence. In this latter
case, states and constituencies within them should have greater policy discretion,
everything else being equal, enhancing their ability to resist a particular transnational
legal norm’s importation.
The studies illustrate the processes of complementarity, conflict, and consolida-
tion of transnational legal norms over time, affecting their clarity and coherence. The
legal norms promoted by the FATF became increasingly precise over time, and
eventually became reflected in binding UN conventions, as Machado illustrates.
UNCITRAL built on the recommendations and guidelines of the international finan-
cial institutions for national bankruptcy law when its members created and adopted
a Legislative Guide and Model Law, as Halliday shows. In contrast, the study of Kim
and Boyle illustrates how two transnational regimes advocated different approaches
toward user fees in primary education, but one of those (the UN human rights regime)
prevailed over the other (the international financial institutions). In Klug’s work,
different transnational legal orders again provided conflicting frames regarding the
interaction of intellectual property and public health protection. This time, however,
the tensions between these transnational legal orders remain. Even though the WTO
TRIPS Agreement’s provisions are binding, relatively precise, and subject to third-
party dispute settlement, activists in South Africa were able to harness international
human rights and transnational competition law norms against demands for pharma-
ceutical patent protection. Thus, they were able to counter partially the pressure for
higher pharmaceutical prices through monopoly patent rights in the context of
struggles over access to medicines.
3. Harnessing Historic Events
Particular historic events create opportunities on which actors can capitalize to

convey transnational legal norms to change domestic law and institutions. Events, such
as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the major debt and financial crises striking Latin
America and Asia, provide such openings. Crises create uncertainty that destabilizes
background assumptions and perceptions of interest regarding legal and institutional
change. As John Campbell writes, historic events can lead to processes of change
involving “punctuated equilibria,” where “a crisis upset[s] the institutional equilibrium
and precipitate[s] a search for a new . . . order that, once institutionalized, usher[s] in a
new period of institutional equilibrium” (2004, 21).
Each of the studies grapples with transnational legal processes within their historic
contexts. The Asian financial crisis created openings for transnational actors to press
Asian states to restructure their bankruptcy laws and institutions, as demonstrated by
Halliday. As Machado shows, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World
Trade Center catalyzed new developments before the FATF and the United Nations
through pressure from the United States. These studies each illustrate how transna-
tional legal processes harness and are constrained by historic contexts.
B. The Relation of the Transnational Legal Order to the Receiving State
The second cluster of factors affecting transnational law’s impact involves the
relation of the transnational legal order to the receiving state. On the one hand, we can
look at this position from a top-down perspective in terms of structure. On the other
hand, we can view this position from a bottom-up one in terms of agents and interme-
diaries. Macrosociological theories, such as world systems theory and world polity
theory, take a top-down approach, focusing respectively on material and ideological
power.7 Microsociolegal studies address the patterns of interaction between local and
global actors, focusing on the role of intermediaries. They help us to “map the middle,”
taking from Sally Merry’s phrase, to understand the mechanisms and dynamics of state
change (Merry 2006b).
1. Power Asymmetries and the Receiving State
Structural power asymmetries have long driven transnational flows of legal norms,
from Roman to Napoleonic to colonial conquests (Whitman 2009). The United States
and Europe are the major producers of transnational legal norms today; they have the
means at their disposal to circulate them and induce their adoption globally. They
diffuse regulatory approaches through the strength of their know-how and experience,
coupled with technical assistance, capacity-building programs, and other inducements.
They control the budgets of the IMF and World Bank, affecting their policy prescrip-
tions. Their national regulations and the private standards adopted by their private
sectors set requirements for products around the world simply because of the economic
importance of their markets (Snyder 2002).
Structural power asymmetries create opportunities for transnational actors to use
leverage, such as economic coercion, in reshaping state institutions and legal norms in
target states. Particular events, such as financial crises, enhance their ability to do so.
Powerful states are often behind these transnational processes, and they work through,
and in conjunction with, international and transnational institutions. Only states in
structurally weaker positions are subjected to mechanisms of economic coercion. The
international financial organizations exercised much more leverage over Indonesia
during the Asian financial crisis than they did over Korea, and they exercised no
leverage over China, as shown in Halliday’s study. They have often exercised leverage
over developing countries in shaping social policies, such as educational policy, as
depicted in the study by Kim and Boyle. Economic coercion is most tempting to use
when regulation has asymmetric financial implications, benefitting some countries
at the expense of others (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000, 80). Such is the case with
intellectual property regulation, as Klug’s study shows regarding the US government’s
7. World polity theory “stresses the embeddedness of nation-states in a wider world cultural context of
meaning and models” (Kim and Boyle 2011, DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-4469.2011.01267.x). World systems
theory, in contrast, has a neo-Marxist materialist orientation in which structural power, whether exercised
by dominant states or transnational capital, is the primary mediator of international relations; the division
of production between “core” and “peripheral” states determines such power. See Wallerstein (2004) and
Chase-Dunn and Hall (1997).
attempt to threaten South Africa with trade sanctions, including the withdrawal of
tariff preferences and the cutting off of foreign aid.
Nonetheless, the studies in this volume address the limits of the use of coercion,
calling into question how much real transformation occurs at the implementation stage
where only coercive mechanisms are used. Coercive measures can de-legitimate a
transnational legal process because they generate resentment. Coercive measures may
initially be successful in inducing symbolic legal change (in terms of legal enactments)
but ultimately be thwarted at the stage of actual implementation—the law-in-action.
The studies highlight both the use of coercive measures and their limits. Indonesia
made significant changes to its bankruptcy law in response to IMF conditions during the
Asian financial crisis, but implementation was often foiled in practice, as Halliday
shows. Kim and Boyle similarly show the limits of structural adjustment conditionalities
on education policy in developing countries, and Klug explains the eventual withdrawal
of US legal challenges against South Africa regarding its patent law (Klug 2008, 2011).
2. The Role of Intermediaries
For transnational legal processes to be effective, they require intermediaries who

are cognizant of both the processes of transnational lawmaking and national settings.
Intermediaries are the carriers, conduits, and points of entry for the circulation of
transnational legal norms (Garth and Dezalay 2010). They can operate at the national
or subnational levels, and consist of public or private actors, offering multiple “ports of
entry” for transnational legal norms (Resnik 2006). They help to diagnose national
situations, monitor national developments and responses, and translate, adapt, and
appropriate global norms for local contexts. Through their links with international
institutions and transnational networks, they form part of transnational epistemic
communities. They play central roles across areas of law, from human rights law to
business regulation (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000; Merry 2006a, 2006b). Intermediar-
ies, in the words of Bryant Garth and Yves Dezalay (2009, 113–14), are “essential to
produce the credibility and legitimacy of these transnational norms.”
The impacts of transnational legal processes are, in part, a function of the positions
of intermediaries. Carruthers and Halliday (2006, 529–32) have typologized interme-
diaries in terms of their competencies, power, and loyalty. Intermediaries may, for
example, have greater competence in legal or economic expertise, have variable power
to translate international legal scripts into national contexts, and have variable loyal-
ties to actors at the national and international levels. These intermediaries include
cosmopolitan government representatives, professional service providers, academics,
think tank policy analysts, NGOs, and social movement leaders.
Local intermediaries can be empowered by transnational legal processes so that
they have a professional stake in them. Through their national and international
connections, they are able to inform themselves of developments both at home and
abroad, which provides them with informational advantages. International organiza-
tions depend on them to convey transnational legal norms to work in local settings,
bridging cultural divides, and, where necessary, indigenizing transnational norms.
National governments and organizations rely on them to present national positions in
international fora and within transnational networks. When these intermediaries have
a stake in the national adoption of transnational legal norms, they become important
allies in attempts to embed them, whether the norms are human rights or business rights
or obligations.
The studies in this volume depict the key roles played by intermediaries. National
intermediaries respectively played key roles in the adoption, adaptation, and applica-
tion of transnational bankruptcy, financial transparency, and competition law norms, as
shown in the work of Halliday, Machado, and Klug. Kim and Boyle show statistically
the correlation between the number of transnational NGOs operating in countries and
their adoption of international human rights obligations to provide universal primary
education. Yet, although intermediaries are necessary, they are not sufficient. To under-
stand transnational legal process and state change, domestic factors remain central.
C. The Domestic Context: Domestic Demands, Domestic Struggles, and the

Extent of Change at Stake
Arguably the most important determinant of state change is the affinity of the
transnational reform efforts for the demands and discursive frames of domestic constitu-
encies and elites in light of domestic configurations of power and the extent of change
at stake. This third cluster of factors involves domestic demand, domestic political
struggles, domestic institutional capacities and legacies, and domestic cultural frames.
Together, these factors shape how transnational legal norms are received and imple-
mented in practice, affecting the extent of state transformation. Sometimes they lead to
the rejection of transnational law, sometimes to significant institutional and legal
change, and sometimes to an appropriation for purposes initially not considered.
First, transnational legal norms need local supporters. Sometimes domestic elites
will support their adoption because the elites believe that legal reforms will spur foreign
direct investment and promote economic growth, possibly in relation to interstate
competition for power (Berkowitz, Pistor, and Richard 2003; Halliday and Carruthers
2009, 339). Sometimes professionals or commercial interests promote them because
reforms enhance their career and business prospects (Dezalay and Garth 2010). Some-
times domestic activists support them as leverage against current government or private
practices (Klug 2011).
Second, transnational legal processes ultimately meet configurations of power
within national political contexts. Legal and institutional change advocated by inter-
national organizations and transnational networks that seem rather technical, such as
over bankruptcy law, can upset careers and power configurations, creating incentives for
factions within governing elites and affected domestic constituencies to thwart the
reform efforts. Such transnational legal reform efforts are difficult to implement because
they can represent “the restructuring of the state itself” (Halliday, 2011, DOI: 10.1111/
j.1747-4469.2011.01266.x). Transnational legal processes will be most successful if they
are useful to prevailing national actors as tools in these political contests.
Third, institutional path dependencies and capacities place constraints on
national change (Campbell 2004). In many cases, countries, especially poorer countries,
lack the institutional capacities to carry out transnational legal prescriptions. In other
cases, the reception of transnational legal processes is mediated through domestic

institutional structures, which have their own interests and their own long-standing
ways. Institutionalized practices do not change without sustained pressure. As Dezalay
and Garth (2002, 14) write, “the results of particular exports of state expertises depend
on the extent to which there are structural homologies in the respective fields of the
importers and exporters.”
Fourth, if transnational legal norms are to have an impact, they should resonate with
local norms. Discursive frames that are consonant with prevailing cultural and institu-
tional norms and practices are most likely to be accepted as legitimate within a domestic
setting, whether the norms comprise human rights, business, or regulatory norms
(Berkowitz, Pistor, and Richard 2003). Thus, activists construct frames that will appeal in
national contexts, such as the use of human rights frames, as opposed to feminist frames,
in challenging discrimination against women (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Merry 2006a,
2006b). Where discursive frames and policy prescriptions resonate in the domestic
setting, local actors can more effectively harness the transnational legal norm to further
their goals. Where the distance between the transnational legal order and the local
cultural and institutional context is considerable, and the extent of change at stake great,
then transnational legal processes are less likely to have a transformative impact.
Local populations have their own interests and ideas and do not simply accept and
reject transnational legal norms. They also exercise agency in translating, reshaping,
and appropriating transnational legal norms for their own uses in their own contexts,
shaping their own histories.8 The norms may often be transformed for purposes that
were not contemplated by their transnational promoters. Klug’s study nicely illustrates
this point regarding the use of competition law in South Africa.
While the new competition law in South Africa is modeled on European Union,
United Kingdom and Canadian statutes, and draws on legal concepts developed in
the United States, it also represents a hybridization of global norms and rules
designed both to accommodate international restraints as well as take advantage of
the opportunities these norms and rules provide to pursue particular national goals
that are peculiar to the history and social context of South Africa. (Klug 2011,
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-4469.2011.01268.x)
In Klug’s case, local authorities use competition law norms developed in the United
States to rein in pharmaceutical prices charged by US-owned pharmaceutical compa-
nies as well as to empower new black ownership of capital. Transnational legal processes
do not simply convey legal requirements that are internalized without reflection of
domestic interests and domestic stakes. Rather, they provide tools that national actors
use to advance particular policies. In this way, transnational legal norms cross-pollinate
and hybridize.
The studies in this volume each focus on the role of domestic factors in explaining
the location, extent, timing, and limits of domestic change. On the one hand, they
address the power of local actors to thwart and foil transnationally promoted legal
change at the stage of implementation. Weak actors at the level of international
8. Campbell uses the concepts of “bricolage” and “translation” (2004, 71, 80).
negotiations and domestic ratification can become quite strong in foiling actual imple-
mentation of transnational prescriptions. Indonesia may have been more easily subject
to economic coercion to carry out bankruptcy reforms advocated by international
financial institutions than Korea and China, but these changes were often thwarted at
the implementation stage, as illustrated in Halliday’s work. Similarly, Klug examines the
work of NGOs in the fight over patent protection and access to medicines in South
Africa.
On the other hand, the studies also address where transnational legal processes
help precipitate significant institutional and legal developments within countries. In
Brazil, the government used the transnational recommendations of the FATF to tighten
banking regulations in order to accomplish domestic goals to combat organized crime
and corruption, as Machado shows. The government was less interested in United
States and European concerns over terrorist networks, which had spurred an intensifi-
cation of FATF activity. In contrast, financial reform efforts were less successful in
Argentina because no domestic demand was mobilized. Likewise, transnational models
provided templates for China in its bankruptcy reform efforts, studied by Halliday, but
China adopted them at its own pace following extensive internal debate.
V. TRANSNATIONAL LEGAL PROCESS AND

RECURSIVE CHANGE
Transnational legal process is a dynamic, recursive one, involving the interaction

between national and transnational law and policy making. National law often provides
the models that are then exported to other nations through transnational legal pro-
cesses. Even when these models become accepted within international and transna-
tional institutions, their adoption is often resisted within countries at the stage of
implementation, which can trigger reassessments of the transnational legal norm. This
resistance can spur new counterpolitics of transnational coordination, organization, and
lawmaking. The intensity of this interaction varies in light of the degree of settlement
(if any) that is reached. A range of actors is involved, including key intermediaries
serving as conduits and conveyors of transnational and national legal norms.
To break down the processes’ complexity, we can think of it, for heuristic purposes,
in terms of stages. This depiction is a stylized one, as the processes are multifold and
multidirectional, top down and bottom up, comprising competition and conflict as
frequently as coordination and cooperation, and involving ongoing interaction between
national and transnational legal norms. Yet, this simplification can be useful for heu-
ristic purposes. First, a domestic policy export often provides a model for a transnational
legal order so that transnational legal norms are often globalized (or transnationalized)
localisms (Santos 2003). The United States and the European Union most frequently
provide the models (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000, 27). When their models are not
promoted through transnational legal orders, US and European resistance to transna-
tional legal prescriptions is often quite transparent. Yet, their prominent role in pro-
viding models tends to be overlooked in much of traditional international law
scholarship, which focuses on the texts of international law as agreed by consensus. For
example, US and European intellectual property law became the basis for the WTO
Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, their competition

law norms the basis for the International Competition Network’s principles and rec-
ommended practices, their anti-money laundering legal prescriptions the basis for the
FATF’s recommendations, and their bankruptcy law the basis for the UNCITRAL
Model Law and Legislative Guide. These national models are disseminated through
transnational legal processes, including through technical assistance, capacity-building,
benchmarking, monitoring, and enforcement measures. Transnational legal processes
help to legitimize these legal exports.
Second, however, these transnational legal norms and institutional prescriptions
often encounter resistance when the models are implemented. Powerful actors may
prevail in international negotiations as well as in the domestic enactment of transna-
tional law. Yet, actors who are quite weak (or unrepresented) in international negoti-
ating fora, and before executives and legislatures, can be powerful at the stage of actual
implementation. Such resistance to transnational legal norms can trigger reassessments
of transnational strategies as well as of the norms themselves. Domestic implementation
challenges send signals to international organizations regarding which legal norms will
be accepted and which rejected. Both positive and negative signals flowing from the
national to the transnational can compel the latter to reassess the appropriateness of the
transnational legal norm, triggering further iterations of transnational lawmaking.
Third, national resistance to the implementation of transnational legal norms can
spur a new politics that catalyzes new transnational organizing and lawmaking. Tran-
snational pressures for neoliberal regulatory models, for example, can incite the creation
of new political coalitions to advance social welfare and human rights concerns, as Kim
and Boyle illustrate regarding primary education, and Klug illustrates regarding access to
medicines. Although international and transnational institutions tend to reflect the
interests of the dominant powers, developing countries and activist groups also can
influence transnational law through their choice among international and transna-
tional institutions in a fragmented international system. They often do so to create
policy space for themselves.
As a result, many cycles of lawmaking may occur as international and transna-
tional institutions find that carefully crafted transnational legal norms are unacceptable
or unworkable in national regulatory settings. International and transnational institu-
tions are thus pressed to reassess the norms and institutional models that they promote
as well as the mechanisms that they use to diffuse them. Many iterations of transna-
tional legal norms may be produced until some settlement is reached, including tacit
agreement to live and let live. As states change along the dimensions examined in Part
III, and as intermediaries are empowered as addressed in Part IV, these developments
can facilitate the conveyance and appropriation of the transnational legal norm over
time, potentially leading to a more embedded transnational legal order.
In sum, transnational legal norms and institutional models are negotiated over
time as part of dynamic, multidirectional, transnational legal processes. The studies in
this volume illustrate when and why transnational legal norms are resisted, adapted, and
appropriated. They do so through the empirical study of legal and institutional change
in countries varying in their relation to centers of global political and economic power.
Many of these countries are quite distal from these centers, but their politics nonethe-
less can trigger reassessments of transnational legal norms.
CONCLUSION
Positivist international law scholars tend to narrow their focus on traditional

concepts of international law; thus, they are skeptical of referring to transnational law,
legal processes, and legal orders. Yet, focusing on the construction and migration of
transnational legal norms through transnational legal processes is critical for the analy-
sis of how national law and institutions are shaped and understood. It is where the
action is. The studies in this volume evaluate how transnational legal norms and
processes interact with domestic contexts. In the sociolegal tradition, they heed close
attention to the variable adoption and adaptation of transnational legal norms in
particular fields and the factors that explain this variation. They focus their inquiry on
distinct regulatory fields (as opposed to separate levels of governance) in order to assess
how the transnational and national interpenetrate. In this way, they illustrate the
factors that lead to variation in the location, type, extent, and timing of change spurred
by transnational legal processes. Their combination of methods, regulatory areas, and
countries help us to create a map for studying how transnational legal process works and
the limits that it confronts.
The studies do not reify transnational law but show how transnational law provides
a tool for particular actors to advance their aims. Each study examines the role of public
and private actors, mechanisms, and attributes of power involved in a particular tran-
snational legal process in different countries. Through a comparative approach, the
studies explain variation in countries’ responses. Transnationally promoted legal change
sometimes catches and sometimes does not, and the studies explain why in light of the
stakes arising from the import of transnational law.
Building from these studies and related sociolegal work, this article has set forth a
framework for evaluating how transnational legal process works and its implications for
legal and institutional change. This conclusion highlights five points. First, we must
more carefully specify the dimensions of transnationally induced change within states,
since state change is differentiated. The article identifies five dimensions: change in
substantive law and practice (law), change in the boundary of the state and the market
(role of the state), change in the institutional architecture of the state (institutions),
change in the shaping and role of professional expertise in governance (expertise), and
change in normative frames and the accountability mechanisms and patterns of asso-
ciation that embed them (normative frames).
Second, the article stressed the heterogeneous nature of transnational legal pro-
cesses. The term transnational legal process can be misleading to the extent that it
suggests that transnational legal process involves a one-way conveyance of coherent
transnational legal norms until they become internalized and embedded within coun-
tries. Rather, there are often multiple transnational actors, institutions, and processes in
competition with each other to convey different legal norms and prescriptions. This
competition affects the relative coherence, clarity, and perceived legitimacy of transna-
tional legal orders, and, in this way, affects the extent of normative consensus regarding
a transnational legal norm and thus its impact.
Third, we must identify and evaluate the factors that explain variation in the impact
of transnational legal processes. Do impacts vary as a function of identifiable factors?
This article organizes these factors into three clusters: the nature of the transnational
legal order; its relation to the receiving state; and the particular political, institutional,
and cultural context of the receiving state. Where transnational law is clear, coherent,
and perceived to be legitimate, it is best positioned to bear influence. Asymmetries of
power between the transnational legal order and the receiving state create opportunities
for the use of coercive mechanisms, but the effectiveness of these mechanisms may be
limited at the implementation stage. Intermediaries are critical for conveying and
adapting transnational legal norms to local settings. Finally, and crucially, the impact of
transnational law depends on the affinity of a transnational legal norm with domestic
demand in light of domestic contests for power, institutional capacities and path
dependencies, and the extent of change at stake. Where the trajectory of change within
a state is synchronous with the transnational legal norm, or where powerful domestic
actors wish to harness it as leverage in domestic struggles, then transnational legal
processes are more likely to be transformative. Where domestic demand is lacking,
change will more likely be thwarted or be purely symbolic. Because domestic institu-
tions and configurations of power mediate the reception of transnational legal norms,
the transnational legal norm is often appropriated, adapted, and used in distinct and
unanticipated ways.
Fourth, studies need to address the mult-directional nature of transnational legal
processes. Theorizing transnational law in terms of being adopted, adapted, or resisted
within national contexts constitutes only part of transnational legal processes. Those
focusing only on the issue of transnational law’s reception fail to capture how national
dynamics can generate new politics that affect the transnational legal norm in question.
These responses include those of not only states that are strong and proximate to
international institutions, but also those that are weak, distant, and peripheral. Assess-
ments of transnational legal process should address the dynamic processes pursuant to
which the national reception of transnational legal initiatives interacts with the pro-
duction of transnational legal norms.
Fifth, changes of national law and institutions cannot be reduced to international
realpolitik. Law plays a mediating role together with configurations of power. Changes
are often initiated, negotiated, and implemented by the agents, practitioners, and
institutions of law—government lawyers, legal departments of international organiza-
tions, judges, private lawyers, corporate legal officers, legal academics, and lawyers for
NGOs. This complex of legal actors is neither uniform in its legal views nor united in
a policy agenda. It operates in the shadow of configurations of national and global power
structures. These actors, nonetheless, form an important part of the politics of transna-
tional lawmaking and transnational legal norm conveyance. Moreover, national insti-
tutions and legal norms are resilient. When transnational legal processes lead to legal
and institutional change, they do so in context-specific ways involving the intermedia-
tion of transnational legal processes with domestic institutions, political struggles, and
cultural norms. The accompanying studies provide empirical grounding for understand-
ing these processes and their impacts.
The study of transnational legal processes and state change beckons for further
analysis and, thus, calls for systematic research agendas. The costs of engaging in
this research are relatively high, but so are the payoffs. When is transnationally
induced legal change primarily symbolic, and when does it have practical effects?
When are particular national institutions, such as courts and legislatures, empowered
or disempowered? What are the critical factors and conditions? What spurs the reas-
sessment and development of transnational legal norms over time? How do transna-
tional legal orders maximize their authority? By focusing on the dynamic interaction
of transnational legal norms and national law and institutions in particular regulatory
fields, the studies in this volume provide the basis for a richer understanding of
transnational legal process and state change, its opportunities, its limits, and its
implications.
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Journal of

Law & Social Inquiry

Transnational Legal Process and

We live in an age of transnationalism. We always have, but its intensity has

© 2011 American Bar Foundation. 229

nongovernmental activists and professionals, and hybrid combinations. Over time,

I. THE CONCEPTS OF TRANSNATIONAL LAW, CHANGE,

A. Transnational Law, Legal Norms, Legal Process, and Legal Orders

Perhaps the best operational definition of transnational law, using computer-age

B. Change and Transformation

We need to specify what we mean by state change and transformation. First, in

C. Transnational Legal Process and Nonlegal Factors in State Change

There are, of course, many transnational impacts besides law on nation-states,

The sociolegal approach represented in this volume combines the examination of

This conception of transnational legal process as recursive does not reify it as

II. THE FOUR CASE STUDIES

be responsible for corporate bankruptcies, and an out-of-court agency for negotiations

III. THE DIMENSIONS OF STATE CHANGE

To assess the impact of transnational legal processes on state change, we need to

Dimensions of State Change Associated Discipline

(1) Changes in national law and practice Focus of Legal Studies

dimension can catalyze changes in others. It is nonetheless useful to disaggregate these

A. Changing National Law: Enactment and Practice

C. Changing the Institutional Architecture of the State

D. Shaping Markets for Professional Expertise and Expertise’s

E. Shifting Accountability Mechanisms and Normative Frames

Transnational legal processes generate shifts in patterns of association and mecha-

groups inside and outside of government account to institutions outside of national

IV. THE FACTORS EXPLAINING THE LOCATION, EXTENT, AND

To understand the impact of transnational legal processes on state change, we

Three Clusters of Factors Components within Each Cluster

A. The Character of the Transnational Legal Order and Legal Norm:

1. The Relation of a Transnational Legal Order’s Power to Its Legitimacy

3. Harnessing Historic Events

Particular historic events create opportunities on which actors can capitalize to

B. The Relation of the Transnational Legal Order to the Receiving State

1. Power Asymmetries and the Receiving State

2. The Role of Intermediaries

For transnational legal processes to be effective, they require intermediaries who

C. The Domestic Context: Domestic Demands, Domestic Struggles, and the

cases, the reception of transnational legal processes is mediated through domestic

V. TRANSNATIONAL LEGAL PROCESS AND

Transnational legal process is a dynamic, recursive one, involving the interaction

Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, their competition

Positivist international law scholars tend to narrow their focus on traditional

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