The rise of global legalism

Abstract

Global legalism is the view that world government is not a practicable approach to global collective action problems but that these problems are nonetheless susceptible to legal solutions. This position is paradoxical: within nation states, government is normally thought to be a precondition of law. This paper argues that global legalism rests on an incorrect understanding of how international law functions, and implicitly relies on a false analogy to domestic legalism, a form of legalism that flourishes in states that have legalistic cultures. Because the conditions for legalism do not exist at the international level, global legalism provides false hope and poor guidance for international law.