Introduction

Transnational law, in Philip Jessup's words, ‘includes all law which regulates actions or events that transcend national frontiers’. For Jessup, Detlev Vagts and others who established its foundations as a field of study, transnational law is not just about rules; it is especially about behaviour – not only the behaviour of States but also of corporate entities, private persons, and other non-State actors who engage in transactions transcending national boundaries. As scholars, their fundamental concern has not been just the nature of legal doctrine but the way transnational law works in practice. They have had a vision of international law that is dynamic, transactional, multidisciplinary and especially problem-focused. As Henry Steiner and Detlev Vagts write in the Preface to the 3rd edition of Transnational Legal Problems, their purpose is ‘to develop a conceptual framework for understanding problems involving more than one legal and political system’ and to study ‘problems that are relevant not only to governments in their dealings with each other, but also to private participants, individual or corporate, in their relations to governments’.

One of the ways in which transnational law becomes a reality in the sense of actually affecting the behaviour of both States and private parties is through the creation of international regimes. A regime, according to one accepted definition consists of ‘principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actors’ expectations converge in a given area of international relations'.