Transnational networked constitutionalism

The emergence and increasing importance of private transnational legal structures in global governance presents a puzzle for legal theory. These new forms of transnational law (TL) can be found in diverse areas, ranging from trade-related issues, to corporate responsibility, human and labour rights, and environmental protection. Transnational constitutionalists have argued that this phenomenon has a constitutional quality. The challenge of transnational constitutionalism lies in developing an institutional model that explains how constitutionally embedded legal authority can arise independently of the institutional structures of state-based public law. We propose a new theoretical framework for thinking about non-statist legal authority, which we term ‘networked constitutionalism’. We conceptualize transnational legal authority as an emergent, network-based phenomenon and elaborate the institutional conditions that undergird its emergence. We illustrate our thesis through a network analysis of a large sample of corporate social responsibility codes.