The processes of legal and economic integration at a regional and global scale have created powerful legal and economic dilemmas. They challenge the paradigms of constitutionalism, including the State's monopoly of constitutionalism, the autonomy of national political communities and the traditional forms of participation and representation. The phenomena of globalization and regional forms of governance have promoted the interdependence of national political communities and destroyed the artificial boundaries upon which national constitutional democracies are found and from which they derive...

This book analyzes a series of integrated studies of relations between the EU, the WTO, and China. It consists of three main parts. Part I introduces the basic concepts. It surveys the literature on law and globalization, introduces the concept of sites of governance and the theory of global legal pluralism, and sketches the foundations of global legal pluralism. It shows that each site of governance has both a structural dimension - consisting of institutions, norms, and dispute resolution processes - and a relational dimension comprising its relations with other sites of governance. The...

The international community today confronts a dramatic paradox: we continue to produce more and more food, yet malnutrition, hunger and famine continue and even increase, placing millions of people in peril. At the same time, the more food is produced, the more risks of unsafe food are increasingly apparent and call to be addressed, partly through law. We hope that this work may contribute to fill a major gap in the field: although food security constitutes a serious challenge on the world scale, one with many consequences, it has so far hardly been a subject of serious attention by scholars...

This book is the first major study of the making of transnational food safety law in China. Francis Snyder shows how the 2008 melamine infant formula crisis led to China's first food safety law and new food safety standards, substantial reforms in government policy and closer relations with international organisations. He also identifies current and future challenges and makes recommendations for dealing with them. Chinese food safety law today is influenced strongly by cross-border factors. While transnational regimes help to shape domestic decisions, many institutions deeply embedded in...