Globalization: Law and Policy
Series Editor: Larry Catá Backer, Dickinson School of Law,
Pennsylvania State University, USA
Globalization: Law and Policy builds an integrated body
of scholarship that critically addresses key issues and theoretical
debates in comparative and transnational law. Volumes in the series
focus on the consequential effects of globalization, including
emerging frameworks and processes for the internationalization,
legal harmonization, juridification, and democratization of law
among increasingly connected political, economic, religious,
cultural, ethnic, and other functionally differentiated governance
communities. Legal systems, their harmonization and incorporation
in other governance orders, and their relationship to globalization
are taking on new importance within a coordinated network of
domestic legal orders, the legal orders of groups of states, and
the governance frameworks of non-state actors. These legal orders
engage a number of important actors, sources, principles, and
tribunals - including multinational corporations as governance
entities, contract and surveillance as forms of governance that
substitute for traditional law, sovereign wealth funds and other
new forms of state activity, hybrid supra national entities like
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and
international tribunals with autonomous jurisdiction, including the
International Criminal Court, the World Trade Organization, and
regional human rights courts. The effects have been profound,
especially with respect to the role of states, and especially of
the United States as its long time position in global affairs
undergoes significant change. Comparative and transnational law
serve as natural nexus points for vigorous and sometimes
interdisciplinary approaches to the study of state and non-state
law systems, along with their linkages and interactions. The series
is intended as a resource for scholars, students, policy makers,
and civil society actors, and includes a balance of theoretical and
policy studies in single-authored volumes and collections of
original essays.
An interview with Series Editor Larry Catá
Backer
What encouraged you to enter
academia?
As long as I can remember I’ve
wanted to understand human organization, to examine it the way an
enthusiastic child examines a complex toy received as a gift from a
relative with a perverse sense of humor. This sort of study permits
the public satisfaction of private pleasure. The academic
environment provides me an environment best suited to this pursuit,
a space within which I can share my discoveries with the enthusiasm
of a child who discovers of the way a complex plaything works or
might be used.
What made you (decide to)
initiate this series?
Innovative work tends to be lost in
the great rush to produce the common. It is important not just
to encourage the production of cutting edge work in an emerging
area of law and policy, but to provide a space were work that might
cut across disciplines might be supported. There is strength in
numbers, and the elaboration of the related work of a community of
scholars can strengthen their individual work and collectively
provide a greater weight and influence for such
efforts.
What are your academic
background and research interests?
I started off my research by looking
at the way governments use their power to manage and direct the way
people think and behave. I was curious about the different
roads to those similar ends taken under a variety of different
theories of governance—democratic, theocratic and
Marxist-Leninist—in their many variations. That led to a
long-term effort to understand how different governance
communities, states, corporations, religions, interest groups and
others participate in and contribute to the governance of the
individual. Globalization has both exposed and given great
impetus to these governance modalities in new and transformative
ways. I examine the institutionalization of governance within and
beyond the state. My graduate studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School
of Government and Columbia University really helped prepare me
for this sort of interdisciplinary research agenda. My
CV is available at http://web.mac.com/lcb911/iWeb/Larry%20Cata%20Backer/CV.html.
Very briefly, where do you
see your discipline going in the future?
In the 19th century,
nation-states, standing at the pinnacle of their power, looked to
each other to create a community of states and deployed a set of
common idioms for that purpose. In the 20th
century, having survived the worst excesses of the deployment of
the power of the state system, this community of states sought to
create a system for the management of the worst of their behaviors.
In the 21st century states and their domestic legal
orders will not be able to maintain their isolation from the
emerging non-national governance frameworks and retain a
substantial relevance; to avoid irrelevance, states and their law
systems must recognize governance polycentricity and more
effectively communicate with the emerging extra-legal governance
frameworks of public and private governance systems and by public
and private actors. It is that dynamic element of
inter-systemic harmonization and its challenges for the
law-state that this series is meant to explore.
What has been the highlight
of your academic career so far?
There are three: the first was
participating in the development of a School of International
Affairs here at Penn State University; the second was participating
in the important work of developing global norms for business and
human rights; and the third was the establishment of my blog, Law
at the End of the Day (http://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com/).
What book (not from the
series but generally) has most influenced your own
work?
I don’t know if influence is the
right word, but Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
(The Man Without Qualities) (1930) has had the most
profound effect on how I see the world.
What do you find
particularly interesting about your role as series
editor?
What I appreciate most about my role
as series editor is the ability to encourage innovative work that
explores law and governance in their systemic aspects within the
current context of globalization. I especially appreciate the
possibility that this series provides to aggregate and leverage the
power of new and exciting scholarship to contribute to and strongly
influence the policy and governance debates taking place now not
only within academic circles but among leading civil society
actors, government officials and corporate managers. In order to
have a voice in the great issues of governance that confront state
and non-state actors today, and that are vital to the forward
movement of academic research, it is necessary to create and
advance communities of discourse. This series is meant to
contribute in some way to those efforts.
Any advice for people
wanting to publish in your series?
First, don’t be shy:
self-censorship, especially in the development of ideas that may
not be embraced by a majority of our academic and policy peers is
no reason to avoid pursuing insights to their reasonable
ends. Second, avoid instrumentalism: good scholarship
avoids both the great strengths and weaknesses of old fashioned
pamphleteering grounded in the bending of words to a pre-conceived
ends, let the scholarship take you where it leads rather than lead
your scholarship to a deliberate end.
What was the last book you
read?
The Infinity of Lists by
Umberto Eco (2009). The ideology and expression of the
unquenchable thirst for cataloging things, people, ideas, actions
and the like, and through that cataloguing to determine the order
of things, provides a great window on the human condition.
Interview kindly received August 2010.