China and Transnational Legal Ordering: Disaggregating the State

Abstract

China and Transnational Legal Ordering: Disaggregating the State develops and applies a new framework for understanding China’s engagement with international and transnational legal orders by moving beyond state-centric accounts that treat China as a unitary actor. Drawing on transnational legal ordering theory, the volume shows how China's legal interactions are shaped by diverse state and non-state actors—including government agencies, courts, businesses, legal professionals, scholars, and civil society organizations—whose roles, interests, ideas, and institutional contexts vary across legal fields.

Organized into five thematic parts, the book examines the theoretical foundations of transnational legal ordering and China's evolving engagement with and impact on international and transnational legal ordering. Its chapters address public international law, including human rights, the South China Sea, and environment law; international economic law; intellectual property and data governance; and private law, including commercial arbitration, corporate, securities and financial law.

Across these subject areas, the chapters demonstrate how China’s legal development reflects recursive interactions between domestic and transnational processes, producing patterns of adaptation, contestation, selective convergence, and institutional innovation. The volume offers a comprehensive account of China’s evolving role in shaping—and being shaped by—transnational legal ordering.

Bio

Gregory Shaffer is Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of International Law at Georgetown University Law Center.

He is immediate past President of the American Society of International Law, and he has served as a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Economic Law, and the Law and Society Review, among a dozen others. He received his JD from Stanford Law School, his BA from Dartmouth College, and practiced law in Paris with Coudert Brothers and Bredin Prat for over seven years.

His publications include twelve books and over one hundred articles and book chapters. The books include The Rule of Law under Pressure: A Transnational Challenge (with Sandholtz, CUP 2025); Advanced Introduction to International Economic Law (with Waibel, Elgar 2026); Emerging Powers and the World Trade System: The Past and Future of International Economic Law (CUP 2021); Transnational Fiduciary Law (with Davis & Kuntz, CUP 2023); The Globalization of Legal Education: A Critical Perspective (with Garth, OUP 2022); Transnational Legal Ordering of Criminal Justice (with Aaronson, CUP 2020); Constitution-Making as a Transnational Legal Order (with Ginsburg and Halliday, CUP 2019); Transnational Legal Orders (with Halliday, CUP 2015); Transnational Legal Ordering and State Change (CUP 2013); Dispute Settlement at the WTO: The Developing Country Experience (with Melendez-Ortiz, CUP 2011); When Cooperation Fails: The International Law and Politics of Genetically Modified Foods (with Pollack, OUP 2008); Defending Interests: Public-Private Partnerships in WTO Litigation (Brookings 2003), and Transatlantic Governance in the Global Economy (with Pollack, 2001). His book Emerging Powers and the World Trade System: The Past and Future of International Economic Law won the 2022 Chadwick F. Alger Prize of the International Studies Association for the best book on international organizations. He also is a published poet, including a chapbook of poems.