The tension between trade liberalization and environmental protection has received remarkable attention since the establishment of the WTO. It has been the subject of a wide-ranging debate, and was one of the central themes of the anti-globalization movement. This book explores this debate. It argues that by focusing on the WTO, this debate failed to understand the institutional and discursive complexity in which the trade-environment conflict is embedded. A legal investigation of this nexus requires a framework of inquiry, which is capable of elucidating this complexity - a model of global...

Is law paradoxical? This book seeks to unravel the riddle of legal paradoxes. It focuses on two main questions: the nature of legal paradoxes, and their social ramifications. In exploring the structure of legal paradoxes, the book focuses both on generic paradoxes, such as those associated with the self-referential character of legal validity and the endemic incoherence of legal discourse, and on paradoxes that permeate more restricted fields of law, such as contract law, euthanasia, and human rights (the prohibition of torture). The discussion of the social effects of legal paradoxes focuses...