Introduction

Our sense of global law as the concurrent emergence of a wide range of claims regarding law's worldwide warrant brings us to the idea of intimation. The very manner in which global law, or its functional equivalents, is approached, appreciated and engaged with as a distinctive modality of law, so signalling an epistemic shift among law's transnational community, tends to be tied up in one way or another with its ‘intimated’ quality. In particular, the intimated quality of global law connects closely with the particular kind of claim to authority that global law entails. Global law flows out of the decentring of a sovereigntist framework and the resulting challenge to conventional state-centred understandings of modern legal authority. Yet the form and process of global law's emergence reveal various special features of its own uncertain relationship to authority, a full appreciation of which requires a close examination of the role of all those who are involved in endeavours to fashion and to authorise global law.

The gathering intimations of global law, as we shall see, have particularly profound consequences for the academic study of law and for the study of the academy alike. For what we are experiencing is a twofold change in the nature of our focus on law as an object of study. On the one hand, and most obviously, the movement towards transnational law and, in turn, to the special type of transnational law we have specified as global law, implies a change in research and teaching priorities – with the balance tilting somewhat from the national to the post-national. On the other hand, the very legal quality of global law as ‘intimated’ is also somewhat different from other forms of law. The kind of material that counts as this new form of law is distinctive, as is the kind of argument and evidence that counts towards this new form of law. In turn, this distinctiveness includes a new emphasis on the academy as participants in producing, advocating or refining global law, with all its attendant difficulties and challenges, so highlighting a renewed requirement to focus on the academy itself as an object of study.