Transnational Justice: Conflicts between Law, Politics and Morality

Abstract

The panel starts from the assumption that there are recent trends of legalization or even constitutionalization of politics beyond the state. Conflicts between law, politics and morality are exhaustively discussed for politics within the national sphere. The aim of the panel is to capture - in practical and theoretical terms - the significance of these conflicts in the transnational realm. There is dispute about the extent to which transnational law meets the demands of morality and also about its potential to impede political expediency. One side sees it as too moralized already to be politically prudent, while the other side cannot detect any moral dignity at all and sees just political expediency. Can transnational law work as an arbiter between transnational political realities and moral ideal? Or must in the end morality be the arbiter between conflicting imperatives of following the law or following political prudence in the transnational realm? Whether or not it might be political prudent or meet the demands of moral justice, law has its own internal standard of legal justice – which might become the more relevant through legalization and constitutionalization. How is the role of legal justice dealt with in relation to political prudence and morality? And which role does it play in transnational political practice? Where and when do conflicts arise between legal justice on the one hand, and political prudence and moral justice on the other? Legalization and constitutionalization might also bring with them political struggles about the moral substance of particular legal provisions or about the normative principles of transnational legal order. Where do we see these conflicts between different substantive conceptions of justice shaping the transnational legal order in practice?

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