Professor Susan Block-Lieb pierces the black box of global lawmaking.
Anyone who insists that global markets run on their own should try to follow a corporation declaring bankruptcy in numerous countries around the world. While cross-border coordination of bankruptcies is nowhere near perfect, the multinational and its creditors would be in a world of trouble without the forethought of organizations like the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law, or UNCITRAL, that spearhead international standards to smooth transnational business.
Global lawmaking by international organizations has enormous influence over the workings of world trade and national economies, and yet the legal academy, the media, and public opinion pay them scant notice. That should change with Global Legislators: How International Organizations Make Commercial Law for the World, a forthcoming book coauthored by Fordham Law Professor Susan Block-Lieb, who holds the Cooper Family Chair in Urban Legal Issues.
In Global Legislators, Block-Lieb and coauthor Terence C. Halliday lay bare what they call the “zones of invisibility” where lawmaking occurs. With little fanfare or hoopla, far from the public eye, states and private organizations send delegates to organizations like UNCITRAL to produce texts that try to change behaviors from the biggest multinational to the smallest home business.
“Observing at the UN, interacting with experts from around the globe in the six official UN languages, is as intellectually stimulating as it gets,” says Block-Lieb, who teaches a wide range of commercial courses at Fordham Law School, including courses on Bankruptcy and International Insolvency Law.
Block-Lieb is well positioned to shed light into what she calls the “black box of global lawmaking.” She has acted as an UNCITRAL delegate since 1999. But rather than writing a retrospective on what happened, a common pastime of academics involved in lawmaking, she observed UNCITRAL sessions in real time, gaining a deep understanding of lawmaking processes as they unfolded.
“We quickly began to view ourselves as anthropologists invited into a secret rite to watch its rituals unfold in front of us,” says Block-Lieb. “Most scholars write about an international organization’s work after it’s all done and written up; we were able to write about developments as they were happening and so avoid the trap of seeing the final product as foreordained.”
Block-Lieb and Halliday explore UNCITRAL’s lawmaking from a sociological perspective. Applying Halliday’s expertise in the sociology of law, they collected data and crunched numbers on issues as routine as attendance records of meetings, keeping track of which delegates spoke and for how long. By documenting the formal and informal behavior patterns of delegate participation, they paint a unique picture of how human interactions and group dynamics shape the creation of laws and legal texts with the potential to affect millions of people.
One of their key discoveries is that a small number of delegates dominated most formal and informal decision-making meetings. Block-Lieb and Halliday call this surprising control a “paradox of smallness” because the outsized influence held by a small number of “high-attendance” delegates sits in tension within international organizations like UNCITRAL that take pains to represent as many countries as possible, whether big or small, rich or poor, central or marginal to the world economy.
“What is most fascinating,” says Block-Lieb, “is that, despite decision making by the few, delegations from diverse legal and economic backgrounds seem to prefer to keep UNCITRAL’s consensual methods of work pretty much as is. When one delegation raised a fuss, the others rejected a proposal for greater formality in the process.”
Halliday says the paradox of smallness and the book’s other findings, such as the “social ecology” of how international organizations interact with each other, would never have come to light without Block-Lieb’s willingness to look at the technical side of law in a new light. “She’s in the forefront of expertise on global lawmaking because she approaches seemingly dull and complex black letter law with creativity and interdisciplinary open-mindedness,” he says.
On the way to publication of Global Legislators, Block-Lieb has written on a wide range of topics that include sovereign debt, the emergence and evolution of international lawmaking on trade and commerce in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and new theories of transnational legal orders. Another chapter, “Consumer Financial Protection, Inclusion and Education: Connecting the Local to the Global,” is forthcoming in a book on Comparative Issues in Urban Law coedited by Professor Nestor Davidson, who serves as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Faculty Codirector of the Urban Law Center, and Nisha Mistry, the Center’s Director.
But not all of her scholarship is international. She has written on issues of consumer finance and consumer bankruptcy law and is currently at work on a study of mortgage modifications reached in local bankruptcy courts in and around New York City.
What is the unifying thread to these wide-ranging and eclectic interests? Block-Lieb says they have much in common.
“Whether held by consumer or corporate or sovereign borrowers, overindebtedness, debt restructuring, and financial distress all center on debt and financial decision making. The connections are there to see if you can focus on the big picture. In today’s world, what happens on the global stage is never far from the local neighborhood.”