Where do the rules that govern our life – those that have a bearing on what we eat, drink, buy, for instance – come from? Who makes them where? For long we looked at the nation state and its laws in search of an answer. But gradually, rulemaking processes have shifted away from the state both to higher levels of governance and to private actors. Rulemaking has become postnational in this factual sense.

At the same time, decisions within one state increasingly affect individuals outside its borders. Domestic constituencies can no longer – if they ever could –make a categorical claim to self-government. Rather, domestic, supranational and global constituencies complement each other and compete for authority. Justifications of rulemaking, if they are to fulfill basic democratic ideals, need to be postnational in this normative sense.

Our research project focuses on processes of rulemaking that take place below the radar of traditional legal doctrine in the interaction between actors including new rule-makers such as experts, regulatory networks assembling administrators and private actors, supranational agencies, standardization organizations, or courts. It places particular emphasis on the interaction between actors on different levels of governance and focuses on elements of authority and autonomy at the junctures of rulemaking processes that unfold between these actors.

The postnational constellation is marked by transformations in the structures of governance and by shifts in the ways rules are made and wield force. Legal scholarship has started to respond and yet has many remaining questions to battle with. Ultimately, our inquiry into the architecture of postnational rulemaking is driven by three overarching objectives: understanding rulemaking processes better, elucidating their normative implications more clearly, and exploring legal reactions and developments in the three fields of public international law, European public law and European private law.

Organisation

The Architecture of Post-National Rulemaking is a project initiated at the University of Amsterdam School of Law by three centres of excellence, representing three areas of law, i.e international public law, European public and European private law.

It is lead by Professors André Nollkaemper (Amsterdam Center for International Law), Deirdre Curtin (Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance) and Martijn Hesselink (Centre for the Study of European Contract Law).

The project team unites a group of mainly postdoctoral researchers that are based in the three centres of excellence and have been partly attracted specifically for the purpose of this project.