Ramraj, Victor V. --- "Transnational non-state regulation and domestic administrative law" [2017] ELECD 1116; in Rose-Ackerman, Susan; Lindseth, L. Peter; Emerson, Blake (eds), "Comparative Administrative Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 582

Book Title: Comparative Administrative Law

Editor(s): Rose-Ackerman, Susan; Lindseth, L. Peter; Emerson, Blake

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781784718657

Section: Chapter 35

Section Title: Transnational non-state regulation and domestic administrative law

Author(s): Ramraj, Victor V.

Number of pages: 17

Abstract/Description:

Two contemporary developments are challenging our understanding of administrative law: the privatization of regulation and its increasingly transnational nature. While neither of these developments on their own presents a serious challenge for modern administrative law, their combination in the form of transnational private or non-state regulation does. Much of the contemporary literature on transnational law is therefore focused on what some scholars call ‘transnational private regulation’—a body of scholarship that highlights the unique challenges posed by a diverse range of non-state actors as standard-setting, adjudicative, and enforcement bodies, though not always all of these at once. Examples of these kinds of regulators would be voluntary corporate codes, industry self-regulatory associations, technical standard-setting organizations, and multi-stakeholder certification bodies. These transnational regulators pose a common challenge for administrative law theory and practice; unlike their domestic counterparts or inter-governmental networks, they have no claim to be even informal delegates of state authority, nor can they claim even an indirect line of accountability to any state. And yet, for most practical purposes—but still out of the view of many domestic administrative lawyers—they function as regulators relative to, and many of them command the allegiance of, a particular transnational community The chapter takes a closer look at administrative law’s blind-spot, seeking to define the contours of transnational non-state regulation and identify the assumptions of domestic administrative law that make it largely invisible, and consider how domestic law might respond to transnational non-state regulation.