A strain of law has emerged since the mid-1960s which asserts a global reach and jurisdiction beyond any international or transnational remit. Intimations of Global Law detects this strain in new structures of international law which claim a planetary scope independent of state consent, in new threads of global constitutional law, administrative law and human rights law and in revived notions of ius gentium and the global rule of law. It is also visible in the legal pursuit of functionally differentiated global public goods, general conflict rules, norms of 'legal pluralism' and the new transdisciplinary legal hybrids such as the global law of peace and humanity law. The coming of global law affects the forms in which law manifests itself in a global age and the shape of our legal-ethical horizons.
Global law is a diverse, unsettled and sometimes conflicted legal category, and one which poses many new challenges.