The book offers the first systematic treatment of European, American and international 'standards law' in the English language.

In quantity and importance, private standards are rapidly taking over the role of public norms in the international and national regulation of product safety. This work provides a comprehensive overview of the rise, role and status of these standards in the legal regulation of integrating markets.

From the world's first stock markets in the seventeenth century, to private policing in the early days of San Francisco, to the millions of credit card transactions and the complex financial markets governed by private rules today, 'Private Governance' makes the case that private rules and regulations are more common, effective, and promising than most of us believe. Analytical narratives weave together history and economics to show readers how private governance works.

Written by scholars who have been at the forefront of the NPG debate as well as by scholar-practitioners, this book provides "lessons learned from experience" on how networked, contract-based and partnership-centered approaches to government can be undertaken in ways that preserve the values at the center of the American constitutional and political system.

From a leading constitutional scholar, an important study of a powerful mode of government control: the offer of money and other privileges to secure submission to unconstitutional power. The federal government increasingly regulates by using money and other benefits to induce private parties and states to submit to its conditions. It thereby enjoys a formidable power, which sidesteps a wide range of constitutional and political limits. Conditions are conventionally understood as a somewhat technical problem of Òunconstitutional conditionsÓÑthose that threaten constitutional rightsÑbut at stake is something much broader and more interesting. With a growing ability to offer vast sums of money and invaluable privileges such as licenses and reduced sentences, the federal government increasingly regulates by placing conditions on its generosity. In this way, it departs not only from the ConstitutionÕs rights but also from its avenues of binding power, thereby securing submission to conditions that regulate, that defeat state laws, that commandeer and reconfigure state governments, that extort, and even that turn private and state institutions into regulatory agents. The problem is expansive, including almost the full range of governance. Conditions need to be recognized as a new mode of powerÑan irregular pathwayÑby which government induces Americans to submit to a wide range of unconstitutional arrangements. Purchasing Submission is the first book to recognize this problem. It explores the danger in depth and suggests how it can be redressed with familiar and practicable legal tools.

Written by scholars who have been at the forefront of the NPG debate as well as by scholar-practitioners, this book provides lessons learned from experience on how networked, contract-based and partnership-centered approaches to government can be undertaken in ways that preserve the values at the center of the American constitutional and political system.

Identifies and explains the constitutional problems triggered by the government's speech, and proposes a new framework for thinking about them.