In this English-language monograph, Professor Waldemar Hoff maps the emergence of “cosmopolitan law” and explains how it affects states and interacts with traditional legal systems. Rather than treating the topic as a set of scattered observations, the monograph offers a coherent account of competition for regulatory space, meaning the arenas in which norms and standards are created, diffused, and enforced across borders.
In everyday thinking, law has an address. State legislatives, courts and authorities apply, and citizens learn the rules that govern them. Yet contemporary governance increasingly produces situations where the relevant rules arrive from outside, or where no single decision centre can be clearly identified. It is in this landscape that “cosmopolitan law” becomes more than a label. It becomes a way to describe how normative authority can extend beyond a single national legal order while still shaping real decisions in administration, markets, and public life.
Professor Hoff takes up a subject that has often appeared in literature in partial, incidental ways. The monograph’s contribution lies in offering an organizing perspective that treats cosmopolitan law as a core legal-science problem, with clear implications for how law is understood and applied in practice.
Regulatory space: what is at stake
The subtitle, In Competition for Regulatory Space, signals the central stake of the analysis. “Regulatory space” can be understood as the terrain where norms and standards are produced and translated into binding expectations. Whoever shapes that space influences how institutions behave, how markets are structured, and how public authorities operate.
In this competition, the issue is not prestige. The issue is rule-making capacity. That is why the monograph speaks not only to legal theory, but also to regulatory practice, public administration, and economic governance in a world of overlapping normative regimes.
Cosmopolitan law and the state
One of the book’s core threads is the relationship between the rise of cosmopolitan law and the state. The argument is not built around a theory “next to” the state, but around a process that changes the state’s operating environment. It pressures classical categories, reframes questions about the sources of legal validity, and forces a more realistic account of how legal authority travels across institutional and territorial boundaries.
Commentary surrounding the monograph emphasizes the international relevance of the topic and the value of addressing it in a sustained, monographic form rather than through fragments.
European Union law as a distinctive legal order
An important element of the monograph is its treatment of European Union law alongside traditional legal orders, including the idea of EU law as an “emanation of the state”. This perspective shifts the usual framing in which EU law is presented simply as an external constraint. Instead, it invites a reading of the EU legal order as part of a broader architecture in which states co-create regulatory frameworks that later shape domestic governance, compliance, and enforcement.
Law in motion: implications for regulators and business
For regulators and public authorities, the analysis helps clarify what it means to legislate, interpret, and enforce in a setting where multiple normative systems can overlap. For business, the implications are equally concrete. Legal risk and compliance increasingly depend not only on national rules, but also on standards and regimes that operate across jurisdictions and can become practically binding through markets, contracts, supervision, or institutional expectations.
In that context, the ability to read and navigate multiple legal orders is no longer a specialist add-on. It is becoming a baseline competence for institutions that operate internationally, or even domestically within globally regulated sectors.
“Cosmopolitan Law. In Competition for Regulatory Space” was published by Scholar in 2025 as a 288-page English-language monograph. It brings conceptual clarity to contemporary regulatory tensions and explains why the “place where norms are made” has become one of the key arenas of competition in modern governance.
