Contextualizing Regimes: Institutionalization as a Response to the Limits of Interpretation and Policy Engineering

When legal language and the effects of public intervention are indeterminate, generalist lawmakers (legislatures, courts, top-level administrators) often rely on the normative output of contextualizing regimes—institutions that structure deliberative engagement by stakeholders and articulate the resulting understanding. Examples include the familiar practices of delegation and deference to administrative agencies in public law and to trade associations in private law. We argue that resorting to contextualizing regimes is becoming increasingly common across a broad range of issues and that the structure of emerging regimes is evolving away from the wellstudied agency and trade association examples. The newer regimes mix public and private participation in novel ways. Their structures are less hierarchical than those of traditional administrative agencies and less clearly bounded than those of traditional trade associations. While the traditional regimes function to make solutions developed in more specialized realms available to generalist lawmakers, the newer ones function to organize collaborative inquiry where neither specialists nor generalists have well-developed understandings of problems or solutions. We explore the structure of such regimes and their relation to generalist lawmakers through three examples—a health and safety regime that straddles private and public law (the California Leafy Greens Products Handler Marketing Agreement), a civil rights regime (the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative), and an international environmental regime (the Dolphin Conservation Program of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission).