The Rise of International Economic Law

FAIN: FA-251326-17

Quinn Slobodian
Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA 02481-8203)

A book-length history of the rise of modern international economic law.

The era since the end of the Cold War is often described as the triumph of neoliberalism. Global capitalism, we are told, is governed by market fundamentalism and a faith in self-regulating markets. Yet often overlooked is a development that shadowed the age of globalization: the rise of international economic law. My book project is the first intellectual history of the field of international economic law. It describes the invention of the field since the 1970s as a transformative and world-making political project, modeled on the competition policy of the European Community and culminating in creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995. My book narrates the deregulation of the last four decades as a simultaneous era of re-regulation under systems of international economic law and reveals the political imagination at work in the apparently apolitical domains of legal expertise.