Abstract

This paper considers Palombella's recent attempt to refashion the idea of the Rule of Law for a densely globally connected society and resolve the modern state's perennial opposition between the Right and the Good - between law as a guarantee of individual autonomy and law as a political instrument of collective benefit - in the new global setting. The paper analyzes the distinction between two modes of transnational law, one concerned with multilevel global legal architecture and the other with the constitution of discrete transnational legal orders. Palombella underlines that both of these modes have to be matched by forms of political engagement. Global law is about the structure of new specialist systems of regulation and also about the patterns of connection amongst these, as well as between them and state legal orders. The challenge is to imagine and to facilitate a pattern of mutual constitution between these legal marks and transnational political organization.