Academic

States, Labor as a Market Commodity, and Human Rights Frameworks--Cuba's Grannacional Programs at the Intersection of Business and Human Rights

Posted on July 17, 2010
The Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) will beholding its 20th annual meeting this coming July 28-Aug. 1, 2010 in Miami, Florida. As usual, the program is varied and informative, combining representatives from a broader spectrum of opinion than is common in meetings associated with the study of Cuba...

Corporate Law and Obligation to Respect Human Rights--Report of the Corporate Law Project

Posted on July 15, 2010
Vanessa Zimmerman, Legal Adviser to John Ruggie, the UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights recently shared the results of a research project prepared under the mandate of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Business and Human Rights that examined whether and how corporate and securities law in more than 40 jurisdictions around the world currently foster corporate respect for human rights...

Testimony of Beth Farmer to Congress on the Impact of China's Antitrust Law and Other Competition Policies on U.S. Companies

Posted on July 12, 2010
On July 13, 2010, my colleague Professor S. Beth Farmer, will be testifying before the United States House Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy on the impact of China's antitrust law and other competition policies on U...

Local Empowerment From Outside: Kimberli Morris on Law Library Development in Iraq

Posted on July 11, 2010
Wars tend to produce great changes in technology, culture, politics economics, law and the  theories used to support their frameworks.  Like other wars, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq during the first decade of 21st century has produced great changes that are only now beginning to be felt in law, culture, military strength and tactics, and law...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Ashby Monk on CIC Restructuring

Posted on July 08, 2010
On his excellent site, Oxford SWF Project, Ashby Monk recently noted the possibility of restructuring the Chinese sovereign wealth fund, China Investment Corporation (CIC) for more effective penetration of American capital markets.    Ashby Monk, CIC To Be Restructured For USA?, Oxford SWF Project, July 6, 2010...

Values Economics and Corporate Governance--Engaging With Shareholder Wealth Maximization and Corporate Behavior

Posted on July 07, 2010
The dominant system of global private economic ordering, grounded in classical liberal economic theory and based on robust private markets and a limited state regulatory role, has come under attack. That attack has been sharpened over the last several decades as the development of many poor states has failed to accelerate and as a consequence of the economic crisis of developed states that began to be felt in earnest in 2008...

Business, Human Rights and Non-Profit Corporations

Posted on July 06, 2010
The binary--good/bad, public/private, military/civilian, profit/non-profit corporation--remains a basic building block for the ordering of reality within most disciplines.  It serves as the bedrock animating (and often unstated premise) in discussion of policy and in the construction of institutions and law systems...

Studying the "Higher Law" of Scientific Development (?????) in Chinese State-Party Constititionalism

Posted on July 05, 2010
The concept of Scientific Development (?????) as both constitutional doctrine and leadership principle of Chinese Communist Party doctrine continues to play a foundational role in the emergence of Chinese Party-State meta constitutionalism.  The concept is particularly interesting both as an articulation of "higher law" that informs both the approach to the leadership (??) role of the Chinese Communist Party under the Constitution and the substantive principles under which the state apparatus (the National People's Congress system) operates...

From the IBA and UN Global Compact: "Lawyers as Leaders--The Essential Role of Lawyers in the Corporate Sustainability Agenda"

Posted on July 05, 2010
John Sherman, co-chair of the International Bar Association's Committee on Corporate Social Responsibility, announced the production of new work that should be of interest to anyone in the field: a video on business and human rights  that Rachel Nicolson of Allens Arthur Robinson, Ursula Wynhoven and Yihen Feng of the UN Global Compact, and I produced for the International Bar Association and the UN Global Compact, with the generous support of LexisNexis...

Law Overlapping at Its Edges--Views From the University of Barcelona

Posted on June 30, 2010
It was my privilege to help organize a recently concluded round-table held at the University of Barcelona in conjunction with its excellent faculty of law.   Th object of the round table was to bring together faculty from a variety of institutions to share their work across disciplines in ways that highlight overlap--that is that focus on the ways in which what appear to be unrelated fields within distinct national legal orders actually reflect common approaches, trends and policy discussions...

Freemasons in Cuba: New Scholarship

Posted on June 30, 2010
Freemasonry has a long history in Cuba.  Since 2005, outsiders have noticed a resurgence of membership in and the activities of  freemasonry in Cuba.Widely popular before the 1959 revolution, Cuba's Masons suffered a precipitous decline in ensuing decades, but the group has since recovered its appeal, as some Cubans look for an alternative to the uniformity inherent in the nation's one-party system...

Indigenous Law and Global Constraints: Bolivia, Decolonization of Law, Constitutionalism and Human Rights

Posted on June 27, 2010
Since the election of Evo Morales to the Presidency of Bolivia, that nation has sought to  transform itself from the modern expression of multicultural Latin American state grounded in the cultural and legal norms of its Spanish colonial period into something else...

The Veil--Torn Between Religion and Law in Spain

Posted on June 16, 2010
The Spanish newspaper El Pais reported on a movement that has been gaining much ground in the autonomous community of Catlunya this summer--the regulation of the veil within Catalan cities.  Justice Minister Francisco Caamaño said on Tuesday that the Future Religious Freedom Law will restrict the use of the burqa in public areas, following the lead of several Catalonian cities that recently banned full-body coverings...

Belief, Reality, the State and Law--Pathos and Bathos

Posted on June 15, 2010
Belief creates its own reality.  For many, over the course of the last several  thousand years, this sub-textual understanding has helped frame approaches to the construction of religious institutions.  There is something subliminally mystical about collective belief, especially in its ability to move the individual...

Institut de Drets Humans de Catalunya: Civil Society in Action--An Interview With Jaume Saura

Posted on June 11, 2010
Civil Society is usually spoken of in the singular--as a sort of unified institutional construct with a single animus and singular organization.  But is it well known that, like states and economic enterprises--civil society serves as a shorthand description for a large constellation of actors which, singularly and collectively, have assumed a critical role in global governance...

Corporate Governance and the Social License to Operate: Foxconn and the Limits of Legal Formalism in Corporate Governance

Posted on June 08, 2010
An important emerging framework of transnational governance for corporations in the context of their human rights obligations has sought to elaborate the sources of an autonomous set of corporate obligations with respect to its stakeholders.  These obligations arise independently of a corporation?s legal obligations under the laws of the state of their incorporation or operation...

Form and Function in Constitutionalism--Diverse Perpsectives on the Kyrgyzstan Experience

Posted on June 06, 2010
The people of Kyrgyzstan have been living through interesting times recently.  Fresh from the overthrow of their former ruler, the people of Kyrgyzstan people have also sought to replace their constitutional framework as well.  Residents in the Kyrgyz capital celebrated Constitution Day on Wednesday with the city's streets in full bloom and a new government promising to turn the troubled state into an oasis of democracy in authoritarian Central Asia...

Human Rights Regimes in an Era of Religious and Ethnic War?Freedom Flotillas, Criminal Miscegenation, and the Conundrums of Law as a Weapon of War for States and Corporations

Posted on June 06, 2010
Like the rest of the people on this planet, I have been treated to the theatre set-piece which has been the contrived drama of the so-called ?Freedom Flotilla? organized with the cooperation of the current Islamist Turkish government and made more dramatic by the realization of the hoped-for violent and clumsy Israeli overreaction and ill thought response (a mark of Israeli governments since the incapacity of Mr...

Christine Bader on Responsible Business and Governance: Polycentricity and Inter System Coherence in Business and Human Rights Governance Frameworks

Posted on June 04, 2010
One of the great insights of recent efforts to develop transnational governance frameworks for business has been the need to broaden the understanding of sources of governance beyond the state. The territorially bounded state may remain central to any effort to extend governance frameworks to economic enterprises that operate across states...

Democ racy Part XXI: Images of Rule and the Incarnation of the State in Democractic Societies in the Response to the BP Louisiana Oil Spill

Posted on May 28, 2010
Sometimes the smallest detail provides the greatest insight into the orientation of state officials and the mindset of an administration.  Taken from the home page of the official web site of the American President is the following text and accompanying image: Taking questions from the press, the President makes clear that he is in charge of the response, that all hands are on deck, and that those responsible will be held accountable...

The Strategic Use of the Public-Private Divide and Politics By Corporate Means: From the Front Lines of the War Between Iraq and Kuwait

Posted on May 27, 2010
I have been suggesting that the distinction between public and private spheres has lost its essential meaning as a separation of spheres of governance that function on essentially different planes.  Yet it seems that the legal distinctions continue to provide states--and economic enterprises--with a substantial space in which they might deploy these formal legal categories for strategic effect...

Manuél Delmestro on Yuan Shikai's Failed Attempt to Restore Imperial Rule in China

Posted on May 15, 2010
For those who read Mandarin Chinese, Manuél Delmestro has just published an intriguing paper on Yuan Shikai's ultimately unsuccessful effort to restore imperial government in China in 1915. An English language abstract follows.??????????? Some Peculiarities & Curious Aspects of Yuan Shikai?s Sui Generis Restoration Manuel Delmestro Fu Jen University; NTU February 1, 2010 Abstract:      This article is not centred on the path that led to Yuan Shikai?s attempt to establish a new dynasty in the then four-year old Republic of China...

Gunther Teubner: On the ?Constitutional Moments? of Non-State Systems?Managing Systemic Compulsion to Self-Destruction in the Global Financial System

Posted on May 09, 2010
In a recently published article well worth reading, Gunther Teubner explores the possibility of systems, like individuals, can be organized as inherently addictive or at least prone to addictive behavior under certain conditions of stress. See, Gunther Teubner, A Constitutional Moment? The Logistics of ?Hit the Bottom?, in After the Catastrophe: Economy, Law and Politics in Times of Crisis (Poul F...

Gesture and Sovereign Wealth Funds: A View From Sydney

Posted on May 07, 2010
Friedrich Nietzsche's old insight about gesture--about the human predilection for gesture over substance -- appears more apt than ever in the context of establishing a multilateral governance framework for sovereign wealth funds.   The importance of gesture is likely to be at the core of the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds being held in Australia this week...

Democracy Part XX: Mass Democracy and Shareholder Democracy--The Aristocratic Impulse in Corporate Governance

Posted on May 03, 2010
Joseph A. Grundfest recently published an excellent article which provides excellent insights into the ideological wars currently subsumed under notions of "shareholder rights" and "corporate governance." Joseph Grundfest, The SEC's Proposed Proxy Access Rules:  Politics, Economics and the Law, Business Lawyer 65(2) (Feb, 2010)...

A Consideration of John Ruggie's 2010 Report to 14th session of UN Human Rights Council: "Business and Human Rights: Further steps toward the operationalization of the 'protect, respect and remedy' framework"

Posted on May 02, 2010
John Ruggie recently submitted his report to 14th session of UN Human Rights Council: "Business and Human Rights: Further steps toward the operationalization of the 'protect, respect and remedy' framework"  (The 2010 Report).  The Report serves as a crucial last step in the long process that began in 2006 when Mr...

Implementing and Integrating China's Amended Secrets Law--Official Views and Objectives

Posted on May 01, 2010
I recently wrote to briefly describe China's move toward a new Secrets Law.  Larry Catá Backer, China's New Secrets Law, Law at the End of the Day, April 26, 2010.  I suggested the tension inherent in the new approach--pitting an older Cultural Revolutionist view of the integration of political and economic orders subsumed within a nationalist political understanding, with the disclosure and transparency requirement of globalized business culture...

Arizona, Mexico and Global Politics in Migration

Posted on April 29, 2010
The control of national borders has become a more complicated affair with globalization.  It is increasingly hard to justify a system in which capital can move freely across borders but labor cannot, and in which there is a unbreakable link between economic and political rights...

Charles Chernor Jalloh on the International Criminal Court, Darfur and the African Union

Posted on April 26, 2010
On April 5, 2010, the Penn State Law School's Human Rights Law Society and its Alternative Dispute Resolution Society sponsored a seminar  Symposium - "Retribution, Reconciliation, Reparation: Perspectives on Justice for Darfur."  I provided  a contextual introduction to the issues raised by an international criminal court system in general and its application to the Sudanese situation in particular...

China's New Secrets Law

Posted on April 26, 2010
The trial and conviction of Stern Hu has provided a global face to a difficult issue within the People's Republic of China--the ability of China to conform its secrecy culture to the demands of a global economy that increasingly prizes transparency and disclosure...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.