Looking for Law in Unusual Places: Cross-Border Diffusion of Environmental Norms

Abstract

AbstractScholars of environmental law are gaining comfort with looking for law in unusual places. As a result, lists and maps of the environmental content of contractual provisions are emerging. What these lists and maps largely miss, however, is the powerful dynamic of how legal norms move across borders through contract. This article argues that contractual provisions operate as critical platforms for the migration of legal norms, ideas and technologies between project and transactional settings. Three dynamics of how this movement takes place (transfer from contract to contract, migration from contract to legislation, and entrenching private standards through contract) are explored – each revealing how contractual practices reproduce selective visions of what counts as the ‘environment’ worth protecting.