Almost a billion people do not have access to clean and safe water. Access to safe drinking water and sanitation is increasingly being considered a fundamental human right. Corporations play an important role in the realization of the right to water. For example, they can become violators of the...

Post-War conceptions of human rights have evolved independently of long-established theory and practice of property and creditor rights, to the detriment of the development and implementation of human rights law. This chapter attempts to build a first bridge between these two fields of law. It...

Concerns have been expressed over the role of WIPO in influencing the intellectual property policies of other specialized agencies of the United Nations. This article reviews the policies of FAO, WHO and UNESCO, in addition to WIPO itself, and finds very interesting patterns of cooperation....

Drawing on Transaction Costs Economics, this paper develops a new approach to conflict of law rules. It outlines a concept of constitutional uncertainty in international trade and presents a model of international transactions in the presence of a diversity of legal orders. We develop a general...

Drawing on a new analytical framework provided by the economic theory of optimal legal areas, this paper identifies the factors determining the optimal size of the European Union. It applies this theory to the question of how enlargement affects the welfare of the current and the new members of...

International migration is maybe the single most effective way to alleviate poverty at a global level. When a given host country allows more immigrants in, this creates costs and benefits for that particular country as well as a positive externality for all those (individuals and governments)...

The Kyoto Protocol sets legally binding emission targets for industrialised countries without accounting for reductions carried out prior to 2008, the beginning of the first commitment period. There exists only one exception, the project-based Clean Development Mechanism where credits accrue...

Should the EU introduce an Optional European Contract Law Code and what should it look like? By applying economic theories of federalism and regulatory competition (legal federalism), it is shown why an Optional Code would be a very suitable legal instrument within a two-level European System of...