Muir Watt, Horatia --- "Party autonomy in global context: an international lawyer’s take on the political economy of a self-constituting regime" [2017] ELECD 621; in Monateri, Giuseppe Pier (ed), "Comparative Contract Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 512

Book Title: Comparative Contract Law

Editor(s): Monateri, Giuseppe Pier

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781849804516

Section: Chapter 20

Section Title: Party autonomy in global context: an international lawyer’s take on the political economy of a self-constituting regime

Author(s): Muir Watt, Horatia

Number of pages: 25

Abstract/Description:

Arguably the most significant principle of contemporary private international law, ‘party autonomy’, or contractual freedom of choice of the governing law, also fulfils a key function within the political economy of private ordering in today’s global context. In this respect, while the principle emerged as part and parcel of the ‘mythology of modern law’, it has also worked, less visibly, to destabilize modernity’s assumptions about the relationship between law and sovereignty, which are now at the heart of the theoretical turmoil within the traditional legal paradigm. The role played by party autonomy in this evolution needs to be acknowledged before new models of social justice can be imagined within the uncharted legal environment beyond the state. With such an aim in mind, this chapter is an attempt both to analyse the way in which the principle of party autonomy provides crucial support for the powerful fiction of an autonomous private transnational legal order and, by the same token, to connect the current tribulations of private international law to the wider debate on the future of law beyond the state. To this end, first, a brief overview is called for in order to set the scene for this analysis (I). The various political representations of private autonomy then need to be revisited (II) before exploring the relationship between the idea of ‘private legislation’ and issues of ‘merely technical’ design (III).