Kuo: Inter-Public Legality or Post-Public Legitimacy? A Response to Professor Kingsbury’s Conception of Global Administrative ‘Law’

Ming-Sung Kuo (Yale Univ. - Law) has posted Inter-Public Legality or Post-Public Legitimacy? A Response to Professor Kingsbury’s Conception of Global Administrative ‘Law’ (European Journal of International Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

Departing from the Westphalian tradition, global administrative law is seen as arising from the pragmatic needs of transboundary regulation underpinned by a normative aspiration to rule of law beyond national boundaries. Unhinged from state consent, however, it faces a twofold challenge: legality and legitimacy. The former centers on the distinction between law and non-law; the latter is concerned with the legitimacy of global administrative law. Benedict Kingsbury’s "The Concept of ‘Law’ in Global Administrative Law" (20 EJIL 23 (2009)) attempts to answer this twofold challenge by centering the new paradigm of international law, as epitomized by global administrative law, on the notion of publicness. First, he pins its solution on the substantive concept of publicness. Second, he portrays global administrative law as an inter-public law, governing the relationship among regulatory regimes in accordance with the value of publicness. his Response argues that Kingsbury’s publicness-centered conception of international law does not resolve the challenges facing global administrative law. Rather, his version of global administrative law does not so much correspond to an inter-public law as points to a post-public conception of legitimacy, reflecting the trend of addressing the issue of fragmentation by tacitly adopting the strategy of privatization in global administrative law scholarship.