Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Courts, Codes, and Custom: Legal Tradition and State Policy toward International Human Rights and Environment Law

Dana Zartner (University of San Francisco). Courts, Codes, and Custom (Oxford University Press, 2014).  

"Courts, Codes, and Custom argues that the degree to which states accept and comply with international legal norms is rooted in a country's domestic legal tradition. Offering a novel cultural-institutional theory to explain this variation, Dana Zartner looks specifically at state policy towards international human rights and environmental law. A state's legal tradition-the cultural and institutional factors that shape attitudes about the law, appropriate standards of behavior, and the legal process-is the key mechanism by which international law becomes recognized, accepted, and internalized in the domestic legal framework. Legal tradition shapes not only perceptions about law, but also provides the lens through which policy-makers view state interests, providing both direct and indirect influence on state policy."
Publisher's website