States increasingly turn to non-binding agreements to advance international cooperation in such areas as environmental protection, human rights, and financial regulation. But what explains the rise of these “soft law” instruments?<\/p>\n
On October 10, the Institute convened an invitation-only book roundtable to consider Andrew Guzman and Tim Meyer’s Goldilocks Globalism: The Rise of Soft Law in International Governance, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Guzman is Jack H. Ralston Professor of Law at the University of California’s Berkeley School of Law, and Meyer is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Georgia Law School. In addition to the authors, participants in the informal discussion included other distinguished scholars drawn from law, international relations, and economics.<\/p>\n
The group examined the different actors who participate in soft law creation, and considered the normative questions and risks of soft law, asking: When exactly is soft law useful?\u00a0Much discussion focused on the question of whether a legal agreement is binding or not \u2014 that is, if soft law isn’t binding states, what makes it law? How should the boundary between soft law and non-law be articulated?<\/p>\n