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How can legal authority be explained beyond the sovereign state? Roughan argues that instances of transnational and international law, along with overlapping constitutional orders, should be regarded as having shared, interdependent and relative authority.
About the author
Nicole Roughan is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Auckland, and formerly of the National University of Singapore where she was Associate Professor and Deputy-Director of the Centre for Legal Theory. Nicole is currently working on a new book,Officials. In 2017 Nicole was awarded a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship from the Royal Society Te Aparangi, to pursue a five-year project on Legalities: Jurisprudence without Borders.
Summary
Interactions between state, international, transnational and intra-state law involve overlapping, and sometimes conflicting, claims to legitimate authority. These have led scholars to new theoretical explanations of sovereignty, constitutionalism, and legality, but there has been no close attention to authority itself. This book asks whether, and under what conditions, there can be multiple legitimate authorities with overlapping or conflicting domains. Can legitimate authority be shared between state, supra-state and non-state actors, and if so, how should they relate to one another?
Roughan argues that understanding authority in contemporary pluralist circumstances requires a new conception of relative authority, and a new theory of its legitimacy. The theory of relative authority treats the interdependence of authorities, and the relationships in which they are engaged, as critical to any assessment of their legitimacy. It offers a tool for evaluating inter-authority relationships prevalent in international, transnational, state and non-state constitutional practice, while suggesting significant revisions to the idea that law, in general or even by necessity, claims to have legitimate authority.
Additional text
The world around us changes, and with it, the explanatory and normative value of received theoretical effort. To undertake the complex work of conceptual revision that is needed when an assessment of that serviceability comes up short is a difficult endeavour. But to regard received resources with a conciliatory eye when doing so, resisting the urge to simplify and polarise in favour of moments of contact, concession, and conjunction, is a particular kind of achievement. Nicole Roughan's accomplishment in Authorities is that she delivers on all of these things. Erudite, carefully-argued, and beautifully written, the book is a genuine pleasure to read.
