This chapter focuses on legal decisions often neglected in the general field of psychology and law: legislative decisions. These decisions establish the legal framework within which other entities operate. The chapter begins with a description of the legislative branch and a summary of different types of legislative decisions. It then differentiates between democratic and nondemocratic settings (e.g. oligarchies, autocracies) and concisely covers theories of power structure – namely, state-centered theory, pluralist theory, and elite-power theory. It then moves on to identifying and expounding the factors that influence legislative decisions. In democratic contexts, these factors include variables internal to the legislature, such as lawmaker demographics, social ties/networks, and party/ideology, as well as external variables such as public opinion, media, and campaign contributions/lobbying. In nondemocratic contexts, however, legislative decisions are largely influenced by power, wealth, and corruption. The chapter concludes by discussing implications for theories of power structure and proposing future directions.

Congressional staff assert that collaborative policy is more successful, especially if the collaboration is bipartisan: Policy letters gain additional attention, invitations have a broader appeal, and bills are more likely to pass. Chapter 7 tests that assumption by examining the outcomes of collaborative legislation. At every stage of the legislative process, collaborative bills are more successful than single-author bills. Collaborative legislation attracts more cosponsors and is more likely to be reported out of committee, pass the House, and be enacted. Bipartisan bills do particularly well, particularly for rank-and-file members with limited institutional power, but majority party members also benefit from partisan collaboration. By working together, members can signal that a bill has broad support – either within or across the political parties – and facilitate a smoother legislative process from introduction to enactment. Thus, collaboration is a valuable tool for members of Congress seeking to advance their agenda.

In this and the following chapters, we examine how IIAs have featured as an argument in national lawmaking. Our focus has been primarily on the general legislative bodies with the power to issue laws applicable to the whole state, that is, national parliaments. We open the chapter with a discussion on the general parameters of the selected countries’ IIA-compliance review mechanisms in lawmaking. In the second part of the chapter, each state in our case studies is presented through a snapshot of an illustrative use of an IIA argument in lawmaking that is typical of that state’s experience with the IIA regime. As these snapshots are often related to contingent historical events and processes, we do not suggest that these uses are somehow essential to that state. Instead, they significantly overshadow the other instances of using an IIA argument in lawmaking in that state.

In this second chapter dealing with the IIAs’ impact on lawmaking, we analyse and categorise other identified instances in which an IIA argument was used in the lawmaking processes. Here, we discuss invocations of IIA arguments in the lawmaking that appeared in a similar shape or form across the studied countries. We also documented cases that, while politically less significant, demonstrate curious intersections between IIAs and national lawmaking. First, we centre on four specific subject-matter areas in which the IIA argument has featured. Those relate to potentially discriminatory regulations, transparency of the public administration, fundamental rights, and expropriation and nationalisation measures. Then, we close with a section highlighting a miscellany of somewhat unexpected uses of the IIA argument. We bring attention to the attempts at influencing IIA obligations through national legislation, ambiguous examples of regulatory chill, and instances of vague and complementary uses of IIA arguments in lawmaking. The chapter presents general conclusions and broader insights on the IIAs’ impact on lawmaking, especially regarding the regulatory chill and positive spill-over theses.

For decades, two sophisticated historiographies, postcolonialism and critical archival studies emphasized that knowledge is power and that archives are power. These two formulas have been subject to recent criticism from a small group of renowned researchers, who stress that knowledge and archives do not possess such a linear and direct relationship with domination. It remains for us, therefore, to explore how, and in which specific social contexts, knowledge and archives allow administrations to achieve more power. This chapter follows the Council of the Indies during its nomadic existence, from 1524 to 1561, in which ministers prioritized communication with vassals (along with a subsequent incoherence of imperial policies) over an assertive, coherent program. This chapter also explores the decision-making technologies of this nomadic council, especially how it applied limited textual hermeneutics to petitions. It also follows the extraordinary juntas: committees which occasionally convened to solve imperial crises and which applied more sophisticated knowledge-based decisions to Indies problems. Nonetheless, I argue, the Council’s members recognized the inefficacy of its theological approaches and its largely nonarchival hermeneutics, setting the stage for reform.

[1.1] Statutory interpretation is a many-faceted thing. It is a substantive body of law and a process involving a set of skills. It is distinct from (but overlapping with) the application of the law. It is not wholly different from the interpretation of ordinary speech. But it is dissimilar in major respects from formulating the ratio decidendi or the rule of a case. Functionally, statutory interpretation resolves a question of law between parties to a dispute. It also contributes to law-making in the sense that the text of the statute, read with the interpretation, constitutes a new understanding of the law.

The introductory chapter presents the argument of the book, that transnational lawmakingcoalitions exist beneath the surface of the UN human rights treaty bodies’ formal actors, rules, and processes. TLCs shed light on the particularities of the treaty interpretation process and provide an analytical lens to understanding the key role expert bodies and issue professionals play in the development of human rights law. The chapter situates the book in the relevant literatures and outlines its research methods and structure.

As the very concept of TLCs rests on this notion of their being a lawmaking coalition through treaty interpretations, the General Comments (GC), the chapter introduces the UN human rights treaty bodies and gives data on their decision-making rules, their membership, workload, and on the instrument of interest for this book, the GCs. This chapter explains what GCs are, the degree to which the UN treaty bodies use GCs in different functions, and how state parties and scholars understand – and contest – GCs’ legal substance. Moving beyond notions of formal authority, the chapter argues for GCs’ authoritativeness because they serve as necessary reference points to human rights, especially because a broader community (NGOs, domestic courts, specialized agencies) enacts them in the realms of domestic law, politics, and civil society. Ultimately, what this chapter makes eminently apparent is that general comments’ authoritativeness depends less on state recognition and more on the multitude of actors breathing life into their interpretations.

Although any act of (international) judicial interpretation can be conceived of as lawmaking, judicial lawmaking under the Convention system is particularly extensive both in quality and quantity. Today, the text of the ECHR and its Protocols is merely the basis of a much larger notion of Convention law. This chapter discusses lawmaking understood as the general effect of Strasbourg case-law beyond the individual case. It analyzes the Court’s extensive lawmaking function from a Convention perspective and argues that ECHR lawmaking is uniquely supranational and integrative. The ECtHR resorts to a majoritarian approach to set a human rights standard, which may be (re-)imposed on states by virtue of the Court’s interpretative authority and states’ primary duty to secure Convention rights. The possibility of third-party interventions can be viewed as both an expression and justification of the Court’s lawmaking power and interpretative authority.