Review on General sources of administrative law

What, exactly, is "law" in the burgeoning discipline of "global administrative law"? This article defends what it calls a "social fact" view of law, which places an emphasis on origins and criteria for recognition, but which goes beyond traditional Hartian positivism by also include "publicness" preconditions for legal validity. "Publicness" is intrinsic to public law in national democratic jurisprudence and is increasingly being used to public bodies in global governance rather than to identified global publics. The extent to which an organization respects legality, reason, proportionality, the rule of law, and certain human rights is crucial to the question of whether or not it should be considered public. This review follows the expanding use of publicness standards in practices of judicial-type assessment of the actions of global governing institutions, in requirements of reason-giving, and in practices transparency. The less an organization can depend on well-established sources of law and legal legitimacy, the more stringently it must adhere to norms of publicness. Only via interaction with public institutions is "private ordering" included under this idea of law. While a universal rule of recognition for GAL does not exist, the notion of law in GAL may be used effectively in many contexts.