INTRODUCTION: THE UNNOTICED RISE OF GLOBAL ADMINISTRATIVE LAW Emerging patterns of global governance are being shaped by a little-noticed but important and growing body of global administrative law. This body of law is not at present unified-indeed, it is not yet an organized field of scholarship or of practice. The Global Administrative Law Research Project at New York University School of Law 1 is an effort to systematize studies in diverse national, transnational, and international settings that relate to the administrative law of global governance. Using ideas developed in the first phases of this project, in this article we begin the task of identifying, among these assorted practices, some patterns of commonality and connection sufficiently deep and farreaching as to constitute an embryonic field of global administrative law. We point to some factors encouraging the development of common approaches, and to mechanisms of learning, borrowing, and cross-referencing, that are contributing to a degree of integration in this field. We also note some major constraints and enduring reasons for non-convergence. We begin to assess the normative case for and against promotion of a unified field of global administrative law, and for and against some specific positions within it. This paper

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 extent of authority in global governance and misunderstand its nature, leading to skewed accounts of the emergence of authority and the challenges it poses. Building on an alternative conception – the deference model – the paper calls for including in analyses of global authority also liquid forms, characterized by a higher level of dynamism and typically driven by informality and institutional multiplicity. Such a broader account can help us to redirect empirical inquiries and reframe central questions about authority, relating in particular to the way in which it is produced, the mechanisms through which it might be made accountable and legitimate, and its relation to law.

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