Trachtman: International Legal Control of Domestic Administrative Action

Joel P. Trachtman (Tufts Univ. - The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy) has posted International Legal Control of Domestic Administrative Action. Here's the abstract:

International law increasingly is designed to constrain the regulatory activities of countries where these activities have external effects on other countries. While countries retain the right to regulate, it is a qualified right, with a number of restrictions under international trade, investment, finance, human rights, and other areas of international law. The restrictions are often nuanced: while maintaining maximum policy autonomy, countries agree to international legal rules that establish increasingly complex preconditions for national regulatory action. In some cases, preconditions are formulated so as to establish procedural predicates for national action. These varying types of preconditions are often designed to be met through determinations and procedures of domestic administrative agencies, and so they form a particular variety of global administrative law: they are means by which international law harnesses and guides national administrative decision-making in order to take into account the concerns of foreign countries. This article develops a framework for evaluation of the choice among alternative methods by which the regulatory activities of countries are constrained, and examines how these methods are used in several important examples of international legal control of domestic administrative processes.