H. L. A. Hart famously suggested to understand legal systems as consisting not only of primary rules (rules that require or forbid certain conduct) but also of secondary rules (rules that determine how rules are created, changed and abolished). This is enough for law within one system, but it cannot account for relations between different legal systems. For this purpose, the chapter introduces the concept of tertiary rules that determine a legal system’s relation with another legal system. The most fundamental such tertiary rule is the rule of external recognition – the rule with which a legal system recognizes a foreign law as law. But this is not the only tertiary rule – choice-of-law rules and certain other rules also count as tertiary rules. The chapter demonstrates the empirical and theoretical importance of the concept of tertiary rules and discusses other examples.

This chapter explores the concept of ‘entangled legalities’ in the context of pre-modern and (post-)modern localised legal orders: regional, imperial, national, international, transnational and postnational. The first section explores the juridification of the international legal sphere; it contrasts private international law approaches with postnational law approaches, exploring the ways in which the recent postnational shift from hierarchical to heterarchical governance structures in fact leads us back to fundamental questions first posed by (Classical) Roman law. The second section focuses on the striking predominance of ‘strong’ legal norms in current analyses of transnational and postnational legal entanglements. The third section, in contrast, argues for a shift in scholarly emphasis away from ‘strong’ legal norms towards a more explicit focus on the importance of strategic legal argumentation in the constructing localised legalities, via a case study of the multiple juris(dictional)-generative practices revealed in the record of a specific, sixth-century, Roman (Byzantine) dispute settlement: P. Petra IV.39.

This chapter considers the emergence of data-driven analytics and its algorithmic techniques of imposing consequences as defining not just new modalities of governance but also as redefining governance forms, and consequently the ways that legalities entangle. The first step is to understand how data-driven governance differs from conventional forms of governance. One can then examine the points of entanglement and their character, whether within, between or beyond the conventional public law containers of legal space. At the centre is an examination of entanglement of law-norm systems and data-driven or social credit systems. That entanglement requires rationalizing a disjunction in how law/regulation systems understand data-driven metrics-based governance and vice versa, with the disjunction complicating entanglement. The first section briefly sketches the emerging legalities that neither embrace the form nor the language of law. The two sections that follow examine the nature of intersystemic entanglements when data-driven governance legal orders are thrown into the already plural mix. The first is the Chinese ‘social credit’ initiative. The second is US and Western private initiatives around emerging markets for data. Each exhibit distinct characteristics and therefore different forms and qualities of entanglement that suggest a more complex fracture and interacting among ever more different systems of legalities emerging around global trade regimes.

Chapter 7 considers the implications of the book's analysis for the study of foreign aid effectiveness as well as policy-making. It establishes a link between political economies and the different kinds of outcomes that donor officials prioritize. Donor governments that outsource aid delivery in countries with bad governance may achieve greater success in providing immediate relief to the poor through easily implementable health interventions than donor governments that continue to engage in institution building in collaboration with the state. However, outsourcing in foreign aid delivery might hamper or even undermine donor efforts to build up a state capable of managing its own development – an objective that ranks high for donor governments who prefer a tactic of greater engagement with the government in the developing country. The book further suggests that the proliferation of neoliberal governance beliefs puts increasing pressure on statist regimes to change their metric, a process, which may come at the expense of efforts to strengthen the capacity of the state abroad. Finally, my book opens up future avenues for research.

One dynamic for the entanglement of law might be the mobilization of law from below. The myriad mobilizations of law by local social struggles around transnational relations refer to presumed precedents from other situations and other jurisdictions, and claim the applicability of norms from other legal orders. Rumours of rights entangle law. Such mobilizations from below rely on strategic comparisons, sometimes conjectural and tentative, and a belief in law’s coherence. From their position of relative weakness, they appeal to any norm that might provide legal arguments. They struggle to make these norms binding, and hence for their trans-systemic validity. This chapter argues that these entanglements strive for relational coherence – a coherence that is simultaneously trans-systemic and unsystematic. It is trans-systemic inasmuch as it refers to norms from various normative orders, and unsystematic to the extent that it does not move towards an intra-systemic logic. Yet such entanglement might lead to cases being treated increasingly as singular, that is, in relation to their unique characteristics. This is evident in out-of-court settlements in which transnational legal struggles frequently end. The paradox is thus that entanglements engendered by struggles seeking the trans-systemic validity of norms increase attention to the singular characteristics of a constellation.

Chapter 4 offers the first empirical test of my theory. The evidence in Chapter 4 is quantitative and tests the argument at the donor–recipient country level, using a data set of 23 OECD donors and their aid-receiving countries between 2005 and 2015.The key explanatory variable is donor political economy type: whether national aid organizations are organized around neoliberal or traditional public sector principles. What I expect to find is that, after controlling for other factors that are associated with aid delivery decisions, donor governments whose bureaucratic structures and rules are of neoliberal character are more likely to bypass under conditions of poor recipient governance than donors whose political economies are organized around a traditional public sector logic. I find robust support for my argument.

International trade law is particularly prone to tensions with other areas of global governance given how trade rules interact with public policies addressing environmental and social problems linked to expanding economic activities. This chapter explores how the relations between international trade law and international environmental norms are construed as a matter of law, for example through in-text references to external norms in World Trade Organization (WTO) treaties, and as a matter of social practice, for example when parties make claims about norm relations in the context of WTO litigation, which can catalyse further norm contestation in other ‘fora’. Tracing these legal developments reveals how the international legal landscape can shift due to frictions between bodies of norms. More often than not, such shifts result in subtle adjustments of the relationships between bodies of norms in tension, leaving the substance of overlapping norms unchanged. In some instances, new norms emerge to regulate these interfaces, giving substance to actors’ expectations of how international trade rules should relate to other norms. In this authority game, advantageously negotiating interfaces between bodies of norms becomes increasingly important. The WTO has played this game rather successfully – to the frustration of environmentalists – by establishing strategic linkages on its own terms.

Transnational regulation of corporate behaviour is characterized by a multiplicity of reflexive norm-making processes in a variety of different forums, creating a web of corporate social responsibility (CSR) normativity in which relationing, cross-referencing but also contestation between bodies of norms become the rule rather than the exception. These interactions are particularly visible within a subset of CSR norms described as meta-regulatory, which often serve as focal points for entanglement. The chapter focuses on one such instrument – the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. The structure of the guidelines facilitates coordinated entanglement by including strategic openings and references to external bodies of norms. Moreover, the existence of OECD National Contact Points (the guidelines’ implementation mechanism) also enables more fluid and contingent interactions between bodies of norms, described in the chapter as ad hoc entanglement. By analysing both coordinated and ad hoc entanglement in relation to the OECD guidelines, the chapter identifies some of the dynamics which characterise the interactions between bodies of CSR norms. The resulting picture is nuanced, with entanglement being present in varying shades ranging from distancing to proximity.

One prominent way for multiple legal orders to be organized is for one order to claim and to an effective degree enjoy supremacy over the other(s). This is of course a familiar state-centric view of law. Such a view depends heavily on a particular concept of legal system, which has been both substantially developed in legal theory (e.g. in analytical legal philosophy) and observationally available in the practices of many states. However, this system-centred view of law faces some significant challenges in many contexts, in terms of both its descriptive-explanatory accuracy and its political acceptability. This chapter explores the way and extent to which the system-centred view of law is not necessary but contingent and so a matter of choice, and the political implications at stake in such a choice. Deploying a previously developed inter-institutional theory of law, it argues that forms of entangled legalities, rather than hierarchical and dominating legal systems, are often not only possible but politically desirable. To make the case it draws on observations about the dynamic and evolving relations between state and First Nations legal orders in Canada.

This chapter addresses core theoretical issues surrounding global/transnational legal pluralism, taking up the work of leading theorists. First, is demonstrates that global legal pluralism is very different from earlier versions of legal pluralism (postcolonial and sociological). Next, is exposes the flaw of overinclusive conceptions of legal pluralism, which appears in the global legal pluralism of Paul Berman, and it explains why theoretical concepts of law cannot solve this flaw. It then addresses the profusion of private and hybrid regulatory forms on the domestic and transnational levels, and marks the line between theory and practice. Thereafter, it exposes problems with the relational concept of law formulated for global legal pluralism by Ralf Michaels, showing why it is unsuitable for many situations of legal pluralism. The approach to transnational legal pluralism the chapter articulates avoids these conceptual problems. It centres on conventionally identified forms of law that vary and change over time, which can be grouped in terms of three categories: community law, regime law and cross-polity law. Finally, it sets forth a handful of specific lessons for a reconstructed transnational legal pluralism.

This chapter seeks to illustrate the construction of ‘entangled legalities’ by investigating the interface of foreign investment norms and human rights. It focuses on social actors’ efforts at shaping the encounter between these norms in sites where their interactions have generated political salience in recent years. Investigating the ‘social life’ of these encounters, the chapter aims to contribute to our understanding of how ‘entangled legalities’ emerge – how and where have they been made and by whom? Drawing upon the framing ideas of this edited volume, the analysis focuses on a plurality of social actors situated in a variety of contexts where bodies of norms and institutions have been brought into contact through practices and discursive statements. Investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS) has remained an important setting where litigants, investment adjudicators and non-governmental organizations have supplied different understandings of the relation between bodies of norms at play shaped by various constraints. However, in contexts beyond ISDS, namely in law-making sites and reform settings, other relevant actors have promoted competing visions of the form of relation between bodies of norms.

This chapter analyses the construction of relations between ‘bodies of norms’ in contexts of global financial governance from the perspective of ‘entanglement’. It examines how entanglements were discursively construed from the 1990s until the period of post-global financial crisis reforms. In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, officials at the Bank for International Settlements, International Monetary Fund and United Nations disagreed on how to order relations between multiple norms and institutions deemed to be relevant for global financial stability. Different ordering projects struggled to manage institutional pluralism in global finance. The move to ‘international standards’ authorized actors to shape and order relations between a growing multiplicity of bodies of norms. The construction of the ‘Compendium of Standards’ sought to order relations between a growing number of international financial standards. Other proposals sought to create a more permanent institutional framework, including via legalization. As the challenge of governing multiplicity in contemporary global financial governance persists, none of the different ordering projects has imposed itself as a common frame of reference.

Chapter 3 elucidates the link between national structures and foreign aid delivery. To that end, the chapter traces how national aid organizations vary in their bureaucratic structures and practices and how this variation maps onto my binary donor typology of neoliberal and traditional public sector donors. By tracing the link between particular institutional environments and aid delivery decisions, the chapter shows how bureaucratic structures and practices influence priorities of aid officials and authorize, enable, and justify particular delivery tactics and donor–recipient interactions, while precluding others. That is, I lay out why and how institutions of different ideological orientation constrain donor officials differently, and how they influence aid officials' decision-making.