Particularly in the context of public law, comparative law scholarship typically involves a comparison of legal norms, principles, actors, or legal institutions in different state jurisdictions or across legal traditions. The rise and increasing prevalence of transnational regulators – particularly transnational non-state regulators, but also hybrid and intergovernmental varieties – challenges this methodological default. It invites us to consider the nature of regulation across different legal regimes, some of which might be overlapping, and which, in their claims to authority, might be complementary or conflictual. Acknowledging the presence of transnational regulators within a plurality of legal orders raises questions about how state-centric regulatory institutions at the sub-national, national, regional, or international levels differ from hybrid (state/non-state) and predominantly non-state regimes, whether in terms of their functions (e.g., in terms of standard-setting, enforcement, and dispute resolution) or in terms of their relative claims to authority and political legitimacy. This chapter shows how transnational law poses a conceptual and methodological challenge for comparative lawyers, yet one that reinforces recent innovations in the comparative law field, reflected in this Handbook, that extend comparative law beyond functional comparisons of rules, legal systems, or legal traditions.

Private regulators operating across national borders play and increasingly important role in areas once occupied exclusively by states and state law. These new regulators and their regulatory regimes challenge state-centred conceptions of law, including public law. The Equator Principles (EP) make up a private transnational regime that seeks to regulate infrastructure project finance world-wide. It includes detailed environmental and social impact standards and procedures. After offering a primer on Thailand’s constitutional system, the chapter turns to a case study of the Equator Principles regime that explains how it works, explores its impact in Thailand, and considers its implications – practical, conceptual, and normative – for the uncertain boundaries between private law and public/constitutional law in Thailand.

This book is the final instalment in an accidental trilogy. The ‘trilogy’ began with the publication by Cambridge University Press of a symposium volume, Global Anti-Terrorism Law and Policy (edited by Victor V. Ramraj, Michael Hor and Kent Roach), in 2005. The debate between David Dyzenhaus and Oren Gross over emergency powers in that book was the inspiration for another symposium (in which Arun was involved as a session chair) and another collection, Emergencies and the Limits of Legality (edited by Victor V. Ramraj), published in 2008. That collection in turn prompted the central question posed at the May 2008 symposium at the National University of Singapore Law School that shaped this volume: what relevance do the debates on emergency powers in liberal constitutional democracies have for the actual experience of and scholarly reflections on emergency powers in Asia?

Questions of this sort are important not only because of the reflections they stimulate. They are also important because they challenge an all-too-human tendency to look to the familiar first. We have both been struck in our research by the extent to which comparative constitutional studies in English are often limited to North American and European jurisdictions, Australia and increasingly, these days, South Africa. Rare is the study that engages Asian jurisdictions. Within Asia as well, we find a tendency to look within or to gaze outward to the West, rather than to reflect on the experiences in neighbouring countries.