A Review of Studies on Anti-Corruption Norms

The forthcoming issue of the prestigious International Journal of Constitutional Law, published by Oxford University Press in collaboration with the New York University School of Law, will be devoted to a collection (or symposium) of articles edited by Leonardo Borlini of the Bocconi Department of Legal Studies, together with Anne Peters, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. 

The collection will focus on the progress of international anti-corruption regulations, a project Borlini and Peters have been working on since 2020. The journal imposes particularly exacting standards for this type of collection, and actually accepts very few such proposals in the first place. Each article within such a collection must undergo double anonymous peer review, and if just one of them is rejected, the entire collection is dropped.

Of the six articles to be released within the review, all by highly respected scholars in their fields, three have a strong interdisciplinary component. Some of the materials have been requested for presentation as part of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) anti-corruption initiatives.

According to Borlini, “The symposium is the result of intense and continued collaboration among experts from diverse geographical and academic backgrounds. The collection offers a critical assessment of findings and explores ways forward for international norms and various other initiatives of international cooperation against corruption, with specific attention to their dynamic relationship with domestic law. The starting point is the observation that a few important issues regarding international legal efforts to fight corruption and their interaction with domestic legal systems – of both merit and method – are understudied.”