Nico Krisch

Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies · Department of International Law

Das deutsche Lieferkettengesetz ist Teil eines Geflechts völkerrechtlicher, transnationaler, regionaler und nationaler Normen zur Durchsetzung von Menschenrechten und Unternehmensverantwortung in der globalisierten Wirtschaft. Es fällt unter anderem durch den Fokus auf die Durchsetzung durch die öffentliche Gewalt, gleichzeitig aber auch durch eine...

Authority is a key concept in politics and law, and it has found greater attention in the global context in recent years. Most accounts, however, employ a model of ‘solid’ authority borrowed from the domestic realm and focus primarily on commands issued by single institutions. This framing paper argues that such approaches tend to underestimate the...

Constituent power is a key concept of the modern constitutional tradition, yet it encounters serious difficulties when transposed into today’s globalized world. Its radical promise, connected with the “ability to make a new beginning,” sits uneasily with a social and political context that seems out of reach and impossible to “constitute.” Yet the...

Constituent power is a key concept of the modern constitutional tradition, yet it encounters serious difficulties when transposed into today’s globalized world. Its radical promise sits uneasily with a social and political context that seems out of reach and impossible to ‘constitute’. Yet the idea of constituent power continues to animate people i...

The consensual structure of the international legal order, with its strong emphasis on the sovereign equality of states, has always been somewhat precarious. In different waves over the centuries, it has been attacked for its incongruence with the realities of inequality in international politics, for its tension with ideals of democracy and human...

Resumo A globalização e o surgimento da governança global estão transformando a estrutura do direito internacional, muito embora essas transformações ocorram num plano abaixo da ordem legal internacional e não sejam, frequentemente, noticiadas. Partindo de uma perspectiva do clássico direito internacional baseado no relacionamento entre Estados, a...

Transboundary problems have provided serious challenges for states’ governance capacity for long. As a result, the modern state has not only begun to adapt its own administrative and regulatory structures; it has also come to rely increasingly on effective institutional structures for cooperation and governance on a regional and global scale. The c...

Emerging administrative law mechanisms are influencing decision making and rule making in the growing variety of global regulatory structures. These include international organizations, intergovernmental networks, distributed administration, and both hybrid public/private and private transnational regimes. We define Global Administrative Law (GAL)...

This is a report on the reform of the United Nations produced by the International Law Association Study Group on the topic. The focus of the study eschewed the well-covered ‘big ticket’ areas requiring Charter amendment, such as alterations to the membership of the Security Council, to provide a critical evaluation of other areas where most reform...

Constitutional pluralism has become a principal model for understanding the legal and political structure of the European Union. Yet its variants are highly diverse, ranging from moderate “institutional” forms, closer to constitutionalist thinking, to “radical” ones which renounce a common framework to connect the different layers of law at play. N...

This book traces a fundamental transformation in law-the turn towards 'postnational law'-which reflects the increasing enmeshment of national, regional, and international law and calls into question central legitimating principles of the different layers. Two fundamental approaches to the structure of this new legal order stand out and form the foc...

Debates about the construction of postnational law and global governance are usually dominated by a constitutionalist prism, by the hope to establish order through principled hierarchies on a domestic model. Yet what we see emerging is quite different: it is a pluralist order in which the different parts (of domestic, regional, and global origin) a...

As the divide between domestic and international law becomes blurred, paradigms for the structure of the new, postnational legal order remain elusive, on both the analytical and the normative plane. In this paper, I inquire into the normative status of two main candidates, constitutionalism and pluralism. The constitutionalist ideal of a coherent,...

The emergence of global governance has called into question many of the tools and concepts by which the traditionally dichotomous spaces of national and international politics and law were ordered, and various structuring proposals are competing to take their place. In this paper I examine two such proposals - global constitutionalism and global ad...

As public power is increasingly exercised in structures of global governance, principles of domestic law and politics are extended to the global level, with serious repercussions for the structure of international law. Yet, as this article seeks to show for the emerging global administrative law, this extension is often problematic. Using administr...

The evolution of the European human rights regime is often described as the development of an integrated order with the European Convention of Human Rights as its governing constitutional instrument. It is argued that the regime is better regarded as pluralist - characterised by a heterarchical relationship between its constituent parts that is ult...

Hegemony and international law are often regarded as irreconcilable: international law is widely assumed to depend on a balance of power and to be eschewed by hegemons in favour of political tools. This corresponds to an often idealized contrast between international law and international politics, one reflecting reason and justice, the other brute...

This paper, a distillation of findings from the NYU Global Administrative Law Research Project, considers the emergence and the need for further development of administrative law mechanisms to promote greater accountability in decision making and rulemaking in the rapidly proliferating variety of global regulatory structures. These include formal i...

By way of overview, we set out in this Foreword some core elements of the concept of Global Administrative Law that animates this symposium; these ideas are developed in greater detail in the framing paper by Kingsbury, Krisch and Stewart.2 We then note briefly some of the many elements that are developed in the other nine papers in the symposium....

Hegemony and international law are often regarded as irreconcilable: international law is widely assumed to depend on a balance of power and to be eschewed by hegemons in favour of political tools. This corresponds to an often idealized contrast between international law and international politics, one reflecting reason and justice, the other brute...

Title in English: The multiplicity of the European Constitution)

[American hegemony and liberal revolution in public international law]

Sovereign equality is one of the great utopias of international law, but also one of its great deceptions. Just like the equality of individuals, the principle of sovereign equality of States embodies a far-reaching promise – a promise to abolish all unjustified privileges based on power, religion, wealth, or historical accident, a promise to trans...

The authors explore international reactions to U.S. conduct in world affairs.

The essay reviews five recent works on humanitarian intervention which shed new light on central questions of the debate. The authors, mainly international lawyers but also scholars of international relations, philosophy and sociology, mainly agree that in positive international law, even after Kosovo, no right to unilateral humanitarian interventi...

This is the authoritative, article-by-article account of the legislative history, interpretation, and practical application of each and every United Nations Charter provision. Written by a team of distinguished scholars and practitioners, this book is the product of a combination of academic research with the insights of practice, and is an indispe...