Oren Perez and Ofir Stegmann (Bar-Ilan University – Faculty of Law and Bar-Ilan University – Faculty of Law, Students) have posted Transnational Networked Constitutionalism (Journal of Law & Society (Forthcoming, 2018)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
The emergence and increasing importance of private transnational legal structures in global governance presents a puzzle for legal theory. These new forms of transnational law (TL) can be found in diverse areas, ranging from trade-related issues, to corporate responsibility, human and labor rights, and environmental protection. Transnational constitutionalists, have argued that this phenomenon has a constitutional quality. The challenge of transnational constitutionalism lies in developing an institutional model that explains how constitutionally embedded legal authority can arise independently of the institutional structures of state-based public law. In this paper we propose a new theoretical framework for thinking about non-statist legal authority, which we term “networked constitutionalism”. We conceptualize transnational legal authority as an emergent, network-based phenomenon and elaborate the institutional conditions that undergird its emergence. We illustrate our thesis through a network analysis of a large sample of corporate social responsibility codes.