Islamic law and international law: the terms of a relationship

The relationship between Islamic Law and other legal systems (basically western type domestic legal orders and international law) is often thought of in terms of compatibility or incompatibility. Concerning certain subject matters of choice, the compatibility of Islamic (legal) principles with the values embedded in legal systems that are regarded as characteristic of the Modern Age is tested by sets of questions: is democracy possible in Islam? Does Islam recognize human rights and are those rights equivalent to a more universal conception? Does Islam recognize or condone more extreme acts of violence and does it justify violence differently? Etc. Such questions and many more presuppose the existence of an ensemble of rules or principles which, as any other set of rules and principles, purport to regulate social behavior. This ensemble is generically referred to as Islamic Law. However, one set of questions is usually left unanswered: is Islamic Law a legal system? If it is a legal system, what are its specific characteristics? How does it work? Where does it apply? It is this paper`s argument that the relationship between Islamic Law and domestic and international law can only be understood if looked upon as a relationship between distinct legal systems or legal orders.

New challenges for international economic law teaching and research in México: Mexico’s outstanding waves of reforms

This position paper argues that at this time of Mexico’s ongoing big transformation, legal educators and researchers in Mexico need to pay greater attention to international economic law, and that a renewal and perhaps some re-orientation of the approach to teaching international economic law, could provide significant contributions to and shape and support both the objectives and outcomes of reform in Mexico. International Economic Law courses and research can be made more useful, not only for students themselves, but also for their contribution towards the role that academics, lawyers, and other epistemic communities need to play in the political, economic and social evolution that is accelerating in Mexico.

Global law in pieces fragmentation, regimes and pluralism

The idea that life undergoes a process of functional differentiation, and that, as a consequence, law becomes increasingly specialized – and maybe even transforms in its very nature – is now widespread. The specialized clusters of law or regulation are very often called regimes, in the international arena, international or transnational regimes. This paper deals, first, with three strong representations of international regimes and discusses some of their problems. It argues that, in order to make a good use of the category, it is necessary to keep in mind the differentiation between law and non-law in the wider context of governance. It then turns, firstly, to the notion of regimes as fragments of a unified and coherent public international law order and, secondly, as meeting points of regulations emerging from different legal orders as well as from other non-legal sources. Within public international law, regimes are seen as related to what is called the double fragmentation of that legal order. As clusters of regulation within a wider global regulatory order, regimes are put in relation to two types of legal or regulatory pluralism.