A symposium on global law, legal pluralism and legal indicators

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Section: Legitimacy Of Indicators In Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global social indicators and the concept of legitimacy

Siems¹,

Nelken²

2017

“…In the absence of a global ruling power, global regulatory dynamics are straying away from state-centred positive law towards new forms of regulations that include, among others, informal rules (Pauwelyn, 2012; Pejovich and Colombatto, 2008), co-regulatory models (Kadelbach and Günther, 2011; Calliess and Zumbansen, 2010; Berns et al , 2007), unidentified normative objects (Frydman, 2014b, p. 183) and administrative-alike regulatory devices (Kingsbury et al , 2005). Indicators are often described as part of these new forms of regulation (Frydman and Twining, 2015, p. 4; Davis et al , 2015, p. 2). The co-existence and interrelation of the above regulatory tools is shifting the centre of gravity of governance from a ‘bureaucratic focus to a market-cum-clan focus’ (Paquet, 2001, pp.…”

Section: Incentives As Stimulus For Actionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…95–97) and legitimacy (Siems and Nelken, 2017). It should also help in shedding light on the most effective ways to improve, resist or challenge their power (Frydman and Twining, 2015, p. 5; Merry, 2011, p. 85; Twining, 2000, pp. 157–165).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The contours of indicators as a subject matter of scholarly interest for academic lawyers and socio-legal scholars remains fairly undefined. As Twining noted, there are not only different kinds of relationships among indicators, but also many kinds of indicators (Frydman and Twining, 2015, p. 7). In this special issue, Siems and Nelken (2017) explore the legitimacy of indicators with global ambitions and related to societal concerns, as opposed to merely local and economic indicators.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Supping with the Devil? Indicators and the rise of managerial rationality in law

Amariles

2017

Managerial devices are rapidly developing as a means for driving the legal performance of organisations, including those of states and corporations. This paper explores the managerial rationality underpinning global legal indicators, and the constraints they convey on institutional behaviour. In particular, it argues that indicators are better understood as part of a system of management control and distributed governance, which is steadily eroding state-centred forms of authority, including state law. In this context, legitimacy and reactivity are contingent to their cycle of production and implementation, which is fourfold: data-collecting, benchmarking, auditing and allocating incentives. Each process is meant to generate respectively subjectification, self-knowledge by comparison, accountability and stimulus for action. Indicators with higher degrees of legitimacy become entrenched in institutional practices and legal decision-making processes. The paper concludes that regulatory spaces where indicators unfold need critical and political scrutiny to expose their pernicious effects, undesirable uses and inevitable misuses.

“…Data are used as building blocks for comparing very different places, despite the difficulty of controlling for the varying meanings of contestable terms in local contexts. Values such as the rule of law or judicial independence are in practice given different interpretations in different places (Frydman and Twining, 2015) or applied differently because of different circumstances. Law itself is likely to work differently because there are likely to be a variety of other mechanisms that may substitute for it or conflict with it.…”

Section: Standardising Comparisons: Global Social Indicatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

From pains-taking to pains-giving comparisons

Nelken

2016

This paper distinguishes three ideal-type contexts in which comparisons are used: comparison as a contribution to disciplinary enquiry, as part of deliberately trying to learn lessons, and as an essential element of a new form of governmentality concerned to rank places in terms of social indicators. After offering examples of the way comparisons are employed (and criticised) in each of these exercises, the paper ends by discussing the overlap and feedback between them.