This chapter examines how international relations (IR) scholarship has approached two central questions concerning international law and legalisation: why do states create international law, and what makes a particular norm ‘legal’ in nature? It then outlines the concept of legalisation as described in Abbott et al.’s well-known article of the same name. Under the classic legalisation framework, legalisation has three components: obligation, precision and delegation. The chapter argues that the classic OPD framework cannot fully capture the expanding role of non-state actors or conceptualise law as a process. It therefore proposes an adapted model for the transnational legal system that incorporates a crucial omitted dimension – implementation. Implementation refers to the concrete actions taken by agents to translate legal or law-like principles into practical, workable instructions for courts, governments, companies, and other non-state actors.

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s key findings, methodology and structure. It also introduces the principal questions the book seeks to address. How have agents, operating at national, international and transnational levels, attempted to institutionalise the norm of corporate accountability for human rights violations linked to transnational corporate activity? What do these initiatives reveal about the nature of transnational legalisation, and how legalisation should be framed or conceptualised in the twenty-first century? Finally, could a revised framework of legalisation help explain when transnational litigation and soft law initiatives are more likely to succeed in the future?

Chapter 1 starts by illustrating the puzzle of American antagonism to the ICC. It then introduces the book’s three main questions: Why does the US fear the ICC? When, exactly, does the US oppose the ICC? And does the ICC’s track record justify American hostility? The rest of the chapter previews the book’s arguments, explains why the US–ICC relationship is of crucial importance for policymakers, and discusses how the book provides new insights into some of the big questions in international relations.

This chapter surveys the international legal framework governing transnational corporations (TNCs) and human rights. It begins with a brief history of the corporation, traces the rise of transnational corporate power since the 1970s, and offers a definition of the TNC. It then outlines the various ways in which corporate activities can adversely affect human rights, drawing on some of the most notorious incidents of recent decades. The chapter highlights the persistent difficulty of regulating corporations at the international level and describes the current regime under which states bear primary responsibility for preventing and remedying human rights abuses within their territories, including those committed by businesses. Since 2010, several states have introduced modern slavery legislation requiring companies to conduct due diligence on their operations and supply chains.

Beginning with a discussion of the right to strike in international law, the chapter explains how most industrial action was regarded as a tortious wrong. Statute provides a limited immunity for trade unions and their officials for industrial action that is part of a trade dispute. In order to obtain that immunity in tort, trade unions must carry out a secret ballot of the members to demonstrate that there is majority support for a strike. Apart from the foregoing, this chapter also examines legal restrictions on secondary action and picketing, and concludes with a discussion of the limited impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 on the scope of the right to strike in British law.

This chapter analyzes the development of discourses on human rights and on inequality from 1962 until 1974 through the lens of Manouchehr Ganji, an Iranian human rights scholar and UN Special Rapporteur. Where other scholars have examined Ganji’s report The Widening Gap from 1973 with a key focus upon its impact within the UN, this chapter contextualizes the report in three novel ways, bringing in his 1962 doctoral dissertation not previously studied in the research literature; connecting it to how inequality became a major theme in the late 1960s and early 1970s broadly across development discourse, and to how human rights increasingly were deployed to denounce inequality; and, finally, by discussing these developments with regard to recent discussions of the historical relationships between human rights, inequality, and neoliberalism. Crucially, beyond the singularity of the one individual studied most in this chapter stands a much more general and pertinent point: The human rights project in 1973 was an ambitious anti-inequality project. It was a structural approach to human rights, aiming at undoing deeper within- and between-nation inequalities.

This chapter examines the sources of law IATs are applying, grouping these sources into two substantially different categories: ‘self-contained’ and ‘universalizing’ sources. The self-contained sources of international administrative law are those which are specific to a given organization, including the contract of employment; the staff regulations and staff rules; the bulletins, circulars, manuals, and issuances of the organization; the constituent instrument of the organization; decisions and resolutions of the plenary organ of the organization or other decision-making body; and the practice of the organization. The chapter then examines the ‘universalizing’ sources of international administrative law, which are those sources, referred to with increasing frequency, which are ‘outward-looking’ and thus may be applied in common by multiple IATs. These include general principles of law, international law, and decisions of other international administrative tribunals, the latter to be referred to herein as ‘cross-fertilization’. As a result of these ‘universalizing’ sources, this chapter concludes that a universal law of internal justice has begun to crystalize.

International law arose in the mid nineteenth century when European powers determined to codify and formalize customary law, to restrain the use of violence in armed conflict, and to create certain protected categories of people. The Hague and Geneva Conventions formed the core of the emerging laws of war and international humanitarian law. While the Conventions have been breached at times, they still form one of the most widely accepted and long-standing aspects of international law. International humanitarian law and laws of war clarify and formalize the differentiation between civilians and combatants, regular and irregular forces, lawful and unlawful combatants. While international laws attempt to make the demarcation of these boundaries as precise as possible, the realities of war always undermine and undo such delineation efforts. Recently, there have been increasing efforts to regulate these gray areas and create international laws and agencies to regulate groups that elude classification.

The chapter offers an introduction to the historical intertwinings of human rights and global population control efforts from the 1940s to the mid-1990s. It describes the aim of the book to investigate how human rights language was strategically employed to justify and implement large-scale family planning programs worldwide. The introduction highlights the complex interactions between individual and collective rights that will be explored throughout the book, including in case studies involving countries like India, Ireland, the United States, and Yugoslavia. The introduction also addresses contemporary challenges and debates surrounding population growth, environmental concerns, and reproductive rights. By analyzing the historical evolution of human rights discourse in the context of population control, the introduction describes the aim of the book as shedding light on the nuanced relationship between individual freedoms, societal well-being, and the ethical considerations inherent in global reproductive policies.

The chapter analyzes the crisis and expansion of human rights in the 1970s as a dual phenomenon of the population control movement. It explores the disillusionment among population control activists due to the failure to achieve desired fertility rate reductions despite international efforts. The chapter highlights the shift in perspectives on the human rights framework for population control, with criticisms emerging from various actors including demographers, sociologists, and international organizations. The chapter also discusses the emergence of new actors such as the women’s movement in advocating for human rights in family planning. It argues that UN reports on family planning were shaped by conflicting political imaginaries between UN member states along Cold War and North–South divides. Furthermore, it delves into the debates among international lawyers regarding coercion, national sovereignty, and the role of international law in addressing population growth. It argues that international lawyers saw the legal regulation of population control as a test of the effectivness of international law as such.