While I doubt that the nature of law as a primary regulator of social behavior and human inter-relationships will change, I do not doubt for a minute that the way we operate this system will dramatically change. As the primary practitioners and shapers of the judicial and legal system, the challenge we face is not how best to withstand the tide of these inexorable forces, but rather, how best to harness the power and utility of these forces and use them to our best advantage. We may all be guilty of resting on the laurels of our sovereign independent statehood and thinking that global trends such as the advent of a supranational criminal law cannot affect our domestic law. These hitherto, neat jurisdictional lines are constantly shifting in time to the trumpets that herald the globalization of justice. To think that we can continue to develop Belizean jurisprudence in splendid isolation from the legal world around us would be a sore and inexcusable mistake.
Globalization is an inescapable fact.
Here I use globalization to refer to that sweeping, worldwide movement that is characterized by economic integration processes, liberalization of national barriers and new trade regimes and protocols. Clearly, no physical force is being applied to sovereign states to comply with these trends. But the equally plain reality is that we either go with the flow or remain hopelessly and helplessly behind. I suppose that, in some limited respects, one can say it is peer pressure at a state level. One example of how globalization impacts law is in the area of intellectual property.