Since the 1970s there has been an explosion of regulatory efforts that have arisen, both within and beyond law, the object of which is to manage MNEs. The MNE itself has also exploded as body on which law can be imposed. It very much retains its identity as an object ("the enterprise") of...

This past summer, the Working Group on the Issue of Human Rights and Transnational Corporations and other Business Enterprises delivered its 2016 Report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. The focus of that report was the relationship of states and state owned enterprises to the state duty to...

In 2013, over a thousand workers were killed when the Rana Plaza factory building collapsed in Bangladesh, one housing several garment factories producing goods for global consumer markets. The collapse, and its consequences, exposed both the complex interweaving of national law, international...

In June 2014, three years after it endorsed the U. N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Council moved to establish an open-ended intergovernmental working group to elaborate an international legally binding instrument to regulate, in international human rights...

In prior work, I suggested the way in which private enterprises have been developing coherent systems of governance that draw on but are autonomous of law and state based legal systems. In this essay I suggest the challenges to the erection of a similar coherent system of legal regulation by or...

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...

This essay focuses on Wal-Mart's role in an important emerging phenomenon: the development of efficient systems of private law making by non-governmental organizations that sometimes supplement, and sometimes displace traditional legal systems. These emerging global systems of private law making...

Transnational corporations are at the center of extraordinary and complex governance systems that are developing outside the state and international public organizations, and beyond the conventionally legitimating framework of the forms of domestic or international hard law. Though these systems...