Editorial.

• Author: Saul, Ben

A common theme running through this volume is the complexity of interactions between international law and national legal orders across a spectrum of substantive areas. The two lead articles are concerned with compliance, cooperation and regulation in international law. Ann Kent presents a timely focus on China's multifaceted engagement with international law. Kent suggests that China has recently moved towards becoming a good international citizen, in general compliance with international law, yet its behaviour continues to give rise to international disputes or threaten the peace over issues such as Darfur or ballistic missile testing. Kent argues that China's lack of cooperation, rather than its legal non-compliance, better explains the challenges China presents to the international order. She therefore argues for drawing a finer analytical distinction between compliance with international law and international cooperation, with the latter being both under-studied and complementary to the more common scholarly emphasis on compliance.

In his article on regulatory multilateralism, Donald Feaver observes that the creation of multilateral institutions after the Second World War was designed precisely to encourage cooperation, communication and coordination among States. Feaver identifies, however, an evolution beyond the inter-governmental architecture of institutional diplomacy originally envisaged and towards a growing network of international regulatory arrangements. According to Feaver, the emergence of such regulatory multilateralism, exemplified by the World Trade Organization, has been systematically and instrumentally incoherent and is marked by structural and substantive weaknesses. Feaver accordingly charts some directions for reform.

Stepping back from issues of compliance and cooperation, it is useful to ask 'what are the standards with which States have to comply?' This question is answered in the next two articles on institutionalised standard setting in international law. Jo En Low focuses on the output of the various human rights monitoring bodies. She argues that the comments, recommendations and decisions of bodies like the Human Rights Committee and the Committee against Torture are fundamental normative standard setters: they establish treaty interpretation and, when they are referenced in national courts, facilitate subsequent State practice. The latter phenomenon draws Low's attention. In an empirical analysis of recent...