GAL Network

The Global Administrative Law Network was a grant-funded initiative from 2008-14, in early phases of scholarly and policy work on GAL. Many links among the participating institutions continued thereafter, and many further institutions became involved.  Some of the further work involved projects on Indicators, Megaregulation (MegaReg), and Infrastructure as Regulation (InfraReg), each of which has a separate section on the IILJ website.

The Global Administrative Law (GAL) Network was founded by the Institute for International Law and Justice (IILJ) at NYU School of Law in partnership with a group of institutions located primarily in developing countries: the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi (India), Fundação Getúlio Vargas Law School in São Paulo (Brazil), Los Andes University Law School in Bogotá (Colombia), and the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law (Canada) and with scholars based at three other GAL Network institutions: San Andres University in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Tsinghua University Law School in Beijing (China), and the University of Cape Town, Faculty of Law (South Africa).

These institutions work closely together in the GAL Network to generate and disseminate multi-country policy-focused research on the rule of law in global governance and regulation as it affects developing countries. A central objective is to give governments and civil society organizations in developing countries the legal means to analyze and respond to actions of global and international agencies, and therefore advocate for their interests more effectively with these bodies.

In its first cycle (2010-2012), the Network conducted multi-institution collaborative research projects on GAL-type rule of law issues in four fields of great importance to people in the developing world: utilities regulation and the impact international institutions have on the distribution of essential services; the balance between intellectual property protection and access to medicines; the struggle to combat corruption and money-laundering, both in domestic and transnational contexts; and the significant and formative interplay between domestic competition law and international regulation, across many jurisdictions.

In its next cycle (2012-2014), the GAL Network conducted four further projects, each addressing important issues concerning the effects of different structures of inter-institutional relations on outcomes in four contexts, building on the first round of projects.