Hard Law Vs Soft Law

Hard law and soft law are two types of law. Hard law remains the international binding law, it is authoritative and prescriptive. Different from hard law, because of its non-binding, soft law is often seen in international relations. According to scholar Kenneth W. Abbot and Duncan Snidal, there are three legal dimensions to distinguish harder law and softer law: obligation, precision, and delegation. In harder law, legal obligation will be higher, on the contrary, softer law‘s legal obligation will be weaker or even no legal obligation. With the precision of international law, harder law is also has higher degree of precision, and then softer law will use more ambiguous, general wording. The third dimension - delegation, the object of harder

Three dimension to distinguish hard law and soft law also show us, because of it has high degree of obligation, precision, and also delegation, it makes commitment credible by some of main arguments: “limiting self-serving interpretations”, “becoming part of domestic law”, and “mobilizing legally-oriented interest” and “advocacy groups”. Then when a law is more precise, states or parties has less ability to achieve their narrow interest. When a hard law becomes part of domestic law, the government will has domestic pressure to follow the law, can shows the importance of laws, and the groups can monitor and publicize state violation of

To analyze in different situation, the action of requested state and requesting states. In Lai’s case, based on no law, no treaty about extradition, Canada has absolute political advantage to negotiate with China. It has its choice to deal with China. So China wanted to extradite Lai for legal sanctions are very complicated. For almost ten years, finally Lai was extradited in 2011.

And in Snowden’s case, Hong Kong was signed an extradition treaty with United States. But Hong Kong did not deliver Snowden to U.S. when he got to Hong Kong. In Abbot and Snidal’s words, that softer law‘s legal obligation will be weaker or no legal obligation.”(Abott&Snidal2000)

If extradition law becomes a hard law, in these two cases, everything will be different. Extradition law become hard law, the higher obligation will save many negotiation processes between states. Such as, no matter which state Snowden went, the state need to extradite him to U.S., no excuse, no negotiation. To overview, there are many conditions in a bilateral extradition treaty. From above two cases, we can see actually extradition is a game between states, including politic, economic, social expectation, legal proceeding and other many factors. Each of these factors can be the key of the success of extradition, which is one of the important reasons that extradition