Larry Catá Backer

• Professor at Pennsylvania State University

This contribution considers the revolution in the concept and practice of trust in corporate governance that first moved from trust in “people” to trust in “compliance,” setting the stage for the digitization of trust measures and the digitalization of compliance. Part One examines the fundamental challenge, one that arises from the near simultaneo...

Humans create but do not regulate generative systems of data based programs (so-called “artificial” intelligence (“A.I.”) and generative predictive analytics and its models. Humans, at best, regulate their interactions with, exploitation of, and the quality of the output of interactions with these forms of generative non-carbon based intelligence....

This contribution considers the challenges for semiotics, for the understanding of the conditions of meaning in relation to the human that is posed by a global obsession with the control of reality and its instrumentalization through the mechanics of simulation. Simulation describes, predicts, and intervenes to manage a situation, context, or proce...

This paper examines the rise of algorithmic systems – that is, systems of data-driven governance (and social-credit-type) systems – in the form of ratings systems of business respecting human rights responsibilities. The specific context is rating or algorithmic systems emerging around national efforts to combat human trafficking through so-called...

Under what circumstances might a state be subject to liability for the conduct of its state-owned enterprises (SOEs)? That question, always controversial but apparently settled by the end of the last century, has once again become important as the old conceptual categories for liability have become unsettled. It is now no longer clear that states m...

Law is usually understood as an orderly, coherent system, but this volume shows that it is often better understood as an entangled web. Bringing together eminent contributors from law, political science, sociology, anthropology, history and political theory, it also suggests that entanglement has been characteristic of law for much of its history....

Among key emerging societal principles to which a lawyer owes a high degree of fidelity are those that advance sustainability and that combat corruption. This essay considers the character of those ethical obligations when sustainability and corruption principles are manifested against the needs of institutions and the objectives of ‘deals’. Part 1...

The concept of consent is ubiquitous in the West. It is the foundation of its construction of meaning for sovereignty (and political legitimacy), and for personal autonomy (and human dignity). Ubiquity, however, has come with a price. The making of a transposable meaning for consent that bridges political community and interpersonal relations has d...

The Oxford Handbook of Transnational Law offers a comprehensive compendium for the field of transnational law by providing a unique and unparalleled treatment and presentation in an area that has become one of the most intriguing and innovative developments in legal doctrine, scholarship, theory, and practice today. This in itself constitutes an am...

The Many Lives of Transnational Law - edited by Peer Zumbansen April 2020

Cambridge Core - Human Rights - The Future of Business and Human Rights - edited by Jernej Letnar Cernic

This article examines regulatory governance (‘RG’) within its own ecology. It considers RG as an ideology of governance, as its own set of techniques to that end, and as a methodology and psychology of the relations of regulatory organisms to one another and to their context. The object is first to chart the structures and modalities of this ecolog...

Though operating in some form or another for over half a century, sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) did not become an object of general attention until the early part of the 21st century when a combination of the need of developed states for investment and the growing acceptability of state investment in private markets abroad made them both threatenin...

China's new Charity Law represents the culmination of over a decade of planning for the appropriate development of the productive forces of the charity sector in aid of socialist modernization. Together with the related Foreign ngo Management Law, it represents an important advance in the organization of the civil society sector within emerging str...

The regulation of business in the global economy poses one of the main challenges for governance, as illustrated by the dynamic scholarly and policy debates about the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and a possible international treaty on the matter. This book takes on the conceptual and legal underpinnings of global governance ap...

Recent efforts have sought to theorize the legalization of the social and economic sphere that is undiminished by time. Though the context has changed over time, the project remains the same—to embed behavior control within a network of mandatory proscriptions attached in some authoritative way to the state. Corporate social responsibility has been...

This collection of innovative contributions to the study of legal pluralism in international and transnational law focuses on collisions and conflicts between an increasing number of institutional and legal orders, which can manifest themselves in contradictory decisions or mutual obstruction. It combines theoretical approaches from a variety of di...

Set against the origins and consequences of the global financial crisis, this timely book offers an enriching and revealing narrative of the role that the state plays in regulating markets. Focusing on core areas of private law such as corporate, labour and banking law, the contributors offer a conceptual framework in which to examine the central t...

The problem of representation has become a central element for the development of human rights norms, not just within international organizations, but within states as well. The problem has been made acute by two significant changes in the organization of power that became visible after the 1950s. On one hand, the idea of the individual became more...

Globalization has produced a wealth of writing that seeks to theorize the emerging relationships between states, non-state actors (especially multinational corporations), and international organizations. For lawyers, the relationship among these actors through law is especially meaningful. What has been emerging in recent years with greater clarify...

Regulatory governance is sometimes seen as a thing apart, as another framework within which individuals, and productive forces, may be managed, and through which the institutions of a governance apparatus can be legitimated and deployed. It is a technique — replacing the command imperative of law with the sensibilities of management. It is a form o...

What is the scope and nature of judicial reform? To what extent does borrowing from Western models also suggest an embrace of the underlying ideologies that frame those models? It is a common place in the West, whether in Common Law or Civil Law states, that the integrity of the judiciary depends on their authority to interpret law and to apply tha...

Religion has returned to the secular state; does crisis result? Conflating variations of Marxist-Leninist states, whose godless communism" of the 20th century sought to marginalize religion as a political adversary, with the Westphalian state that sought to avoid sectarian Conflict by separating the institutional state from the apparatus of religio...

The adoption of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in 2011 marked a watershed moment, establishing the first global standards for preventing human rights abuses by business. In light of this paradigm shift, The Business and Human Rights Landscape offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of the current legal fra...

The adoption of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in 2011 marked a watershed moment, establishing the first global standards for preventing human rights abuses by business. In light of this paradigm shift, The Business and Human Rights Landscape offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of the current legal fra...

Eco in the Manifesto follows some of the cultural factors that determine the text at hand, its style, its rhetoric, its many historical evolutions included—such cultural events function as words when reading in a semiotic mode. We read the Manifesto appreciating its rhetorical gags, and forget how these are carefully prepared signs that unfold in w...

This 5th editorial text introduces a never observed but most striking parallel between the ways of thinking and thought formation of Lady Vistoria Welby and her significs project, and the French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan. The major focus in those parallels is on their ideas about the human Self and the Occidental culture, which ch...

This chapter and the two next chapters are texts of the first legal semiotician in the world: the Dutch poet, novelist, politician, lawyer and legal scholar Jacob Israel de Haan, who lived until 1919 in Amsterdam and until 1926 in Jerusalem. The editorial focuses primarily on the inaugural lecture, held on October 31, 1916 and translated in English...

This second editorial of this book is on the importance of the correspondence between Charles Sanders Peirce and Lady Victoria Welby—their letters show many aspects of an evolving philosophical insight that centers (in hindsight) around the issue of meaning. The two letters, which are introduced here, form as it were an autobiography of Peircean ph...

Legal semiotics has its problems with semiotics in general in so far as law is in many regards and very much despite the urgent need to change this feature, a static discourse. It is only since Russian structural linguistics, Greimas and Kristeva, that this need to further a dynamic semiotics is registered. That urge is described in the 4th editori...

Lawyers read and write texts, interpret and give priority to what others wrote and decided before. Awareness of the dynamics of these semiotic activities would improve the humane character of law and enrich its notion of justice. A dynamic semiotics with understanding meaning as an issue of constant flow will become visible so that the task of a la...

Greimas’s essay is semiotics at its best, situated between a politically and philosophically static approach which is too often rather conservative, and a full-fledged dynamic profile which criticizes the foundations of (corporate) law from a semiotic viewpoint and puts the legal use of the concepts ‘person’ or ‘subject’ in perspective. As a conseq...

The purpose of this book is not to produce a (hitherto unwritten) history of semiotics in the 20th century, nor to describe the applicability of semiotics in law and legal discourse. The text focuses on a deeper problem. Semiotics, daughter of linguistics at the end of the 19th century, still suffers from predominantly static features—those static...

A text has, not unlike a word, never one meaning and in particular never one forever fixated meaning, as lawyers experience often against their desire when they would like to find an “originalist” ground for their determination of text-meanings in law. Reading legal texts in the semiotic mode is reading sign meanings in connection with their social...

This part of the Source Book focuses on trends to develop semiotic awareness in legal education and law’s practices. Its texts could be understood as presenting the ultimate goal of positioning the semiotics of law in legal education. Their broadening knowledge might bring a deeper understanding of legal practice, and a heightening semiotic awarene...

Justinian (482–565 BC), a Roman Emperor residing in Constantinople with the strong desire to re-unite the Roman Empire with Rome as its capital, ordered a new body of law, called the Corpus Iuris Civilis, long before the diversification between Civil- and Common Law. He wanted to establish a re-ordering of centuries old Roman Law, to eliminate what...

Firstness has a great quality in Peirce’s philosophy. This editorial shows that position and relates to a few lines of particular interest to lawyers: “A court may issue injunctions and judgments against me and I not care a snap of my finger for them. I may think them idle vapor. But when I feel the sheriff’s hand on my shoulder, I shall begin to h...

Legal semiotics in the guise of legal significs was for the first time exposed in the PhD dissertation of De Haan in Amsterdam, 1916. That publication can in hindsight be seen as the first work on legal semiotics, and the same year the first inaugural lecture took place at the University of Amsterdam, as translated in this volume. De Haan underline...

It seems rather challenging: persons, things and obligations do not exist in the sense of ‘natural’ entities. So, how do we come to appreciate their diversification and the order they suggest to represent? A first answer to this question is, that persons, things and obligations are elements embedded in the history of Occidental culture. The period...

Especially since the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century, once more we have seen more focused interest in the use of SWFs by home states—less as a means of projecting sovereign financial power outwards and more as a means of internal financial management, and development. What makes this interesting from the perspective of SWF de...

The debate over competing conceptions of juridical persons still shows life today in terms not much removed from those of a century ago. At the core of the “juridical personality” debate are two views of the critical nature of economic organizations. For one, economic organizations are property in the hands of their owners. This property might be g...

This volume provides a critical roadmap through the major historical sources of legal semiotics as we know them today. The history of legal semiotics, now at least a century old, has never been written (a non-event itself pregnant with semiotic possibility). As a consequence, its sources are seldom clearly exposed and, as word, object and meaning c...

The problem of representation has become a central element for the development of human rights norms, not just within international organizations, but within states as well. The problem has been made acute by two significant changes in the organization of power that became visible after the 1950s. On one hand, the idea of the individual became more...

This article considers the evolution of governance standards for determining the extent of an enterprise’s responsibilities to protect human rights in weak governance zones. The article briefly describes the development of the standard and then evaluates the standard as it has been developed and framed within the U.N. Guiding Principles for Busines...

The state of constitutional theory is in flux. What was once the preserve of those who organized the state became the expression of mass democracy and the popular will, one that has been increasingly constrained by international consensus on the limits of political will within national borders. The stakes are high-constitutional legitimacy is funda...

This paper considers the conception of constitutionalization as a structure for theorizing a space within which constitutionalized entities may interact in accordance with the ideological principles of legitimizing constitutionalism. Constitutions have been the means through which states have expressed their organization and ruling ideologies. Cons...

Global human rights NGOs evidence the power and temptations of the great normative institutional forces that affect the governance projects of transnational society in the early 21st century. These forces — (1) the drive for order and rationality even within emerging polycentric orders beyond the state, and (2) the transformation of the individual...

In the West democratic constitutionalism is grounded on the premise that democracy occurs outside of the organs of state, through elections and discourse. Chinese constitutional theorists have begun to elaborate a distinct view — that democratic constitutionalism may also be grounded on the premise that democracy occurs within the organs of state a...

Globalization has produced a growing number of governance regimes beyond the reach of the domestic legal orders of states. These systems sometimes collide when their overlapping areas of competence lead to contradictory decisions or mutual obstruction. Is it possible to manage these collisions to produce order among colliding systems with no normat...

From its from its inception, the Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights (GPs) have occupied a contentious and dynamic space — at once setting the framework for operationalization of regimes of business and human rights by states and enterprises, and simultaneously posing as either as a gateway or obstacle to the production of internationa...

This chapter shows how the social and institutional organization and political culture of China have affected how Chinese corporations approach the issue of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in general and CSR-based human rights responsibilities in particular. Part I examines the global context in which Chinese CSR is framed. Part II analyzes t...

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the viability of the shangfang system within the Chinese historical, political and legal context, and to suggest ways in which shuanggui might benefit from further institutionalization under China’s constitutional framework and its emergent socialist rule of law. To do this, we must first think through what s...

Under the leadership of Raul Castro, Cuba has embarked on a series of changes that have focused on internal institutional reforms and their impact on the Cuban economy. These reforms have proven perplexing both for their ambitions and their limits. The usual explanations prove disappointing. This paper suggests that no consideration of these reform...

While its importance in domestic law has long been acknowledged, transparency has until now remained largely unexplored in international law. This study of transparency issues in key areas such as international economic law, environmental law, human rights law and humanitarian law brings together new and important insights on this pressing issue. C...

Structuralism, although widely neglected in many philosophy encyclopedias, is one of the major foundations for semiotics and has in that context the same importance as phenomenology or analytical philosophy. Structuralism focuses on elements of structures within which the relationships of individuals can function in the boundaries of the structural...