Curriculum Guide · Courses

Professor Short

J.D. Seminar 1027 | 3 credit hours

The increasingly multinational production of goods and services poses challenges for the development and enforcement of regulatory standards across national borders. There are significant limitations on the ability of domestic and international legal regimes to address these challenges. This seminar will investigate the various private regulatory regimes that have developed in response to these limitations in the contexts of global labor and environmental regulation. We will look at private regulatory mechanisms including international NGOs, certification programs, corporate codes of conduct, ranking systems, supply chain management, and private inspection regimes and compare their operation in the contexts of global labor and environmental regulation. We will investigate the mechanisms by which these regimes purport to work, evidence of their efficacy, and theories about their normative desirability. We also will address the implications of private global regulatory regimes for activism, resistance and democracy. The aim of these analyses will be to think about the possibilities and limitations of corporations and other private actors as sources and enforcers of global norms and to examine how they interact with and influence traditional domestic and international legal institutions.

Students may not receive credit for this seminar and The iPad’s Human Cost Seminar: Corporate Accountability for Workers in the Global Supply Chain.