Multi-Sourced Equivalent Norms in International Law

Recent decades have witnessed an impressive process of normative development in international law. Numerous new treaties have been concluded at global and regional levels, establishing far-reaching international legal and regulatory regimes in important areas such as human rights, international trade, environmental protection, criminal law, intellectual property, and more. New political and judicial institutions have been established to develop, apply, and adjudicate these rules. This trend has been accompanied by the growing consolidation of treaty norms into international custom and increased references to international law in domestic settings. As a result of these developments, international relations have now reached an unprecedented level of normative density and intensity, but they have also given rise to the phenomenon of 'fragmentation.' The debate over the fragmentation of international law has largely focused on conflicts: conflicts of norms and conflicts of authority. However, the same developments that have given rise to greater conflict and contradiction in international law, have also produced a growing amount of normative equivalence between rules in different fields of international law. New treaty rules often echo existing international customary norms. Regional arrangements reinforce undertakings that already exist at the global level and common concerns and solutions appear in many international legal fields. This book focuses on such instances of normative parallelism, developing the concept of 'multi-sourced equivalent norms' in international law. Its contributions - by leading international law experts - explore the legal and political implications of the concept in a variety of contexts that span the full spectrum of international legal norms and institutions.

Tomer Broude is the Sylvan M. Cohen Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law and Department of International Relations, and the Academic Director of the Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.Yuval Shany is the Hersch Lauterpacht Chair in Public International Law at the Faculty of Law of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a director in the Project on International Courts and Tribunals.