The ‘business and human rights’ (BHR) field emerged amidst concerns during the last thirty years over the adequacy of national legal systems and institutions in addressing transnational human rights impacts of global market integration. BHR relies on transnational governance networks and...

Are human rights to be found in living instruments and practices that adapt to changing circumstances, or must they be interpreted according to their original meaning? That question, so heavily debated in the context of the rights of the U.S. Constitution, was never seriously on the table until...

Conference proceeding of the American Society of International Law. This panel was convened at 10:45 a.m., Friday, March 27, by its moderator, Penelope Simons of the University of Ottawa, who introduced the panelists: John G. Ruggie of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Special...

Imposing legal liability on corporations for their involvement in human rights violations remains problematic. In the United States, civil liability in such circumstances developed in a series of Alien Tort Statute cases. This evolution came to an abrupt end with the cases of Kiobel v. Royal...

The eminent case of Aguinda v. Chevron Corporation, currently in its twentieth year of litigation, represents a growing phenomenon in international commercial litigation between multinational corporations and victims of human rights abuse from developing nations. In 2011 Aguinda awarded...

In recent years, a number of international and cross-sectoral initiatives have attempted to respond to the human rights impacts of corporations. Foremost among these is the United Nations’ 2008 “Protect, Respect, and Remedy” Framework and its Guiding Principles on Business and Human...

Some commentators have recently proclaimed the U.S. Alien Tort Claims Act to be dead. In Nevsun Resources, the Canadian Supreme Court took a seemingly bold step in providing access to justice to victims of human rights abuses against corporate entities, presumably to partly fill this void. This...

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...

Because international law has traditionally been limited to state actors, the literature on business and human rights largely focuses on whether transnational corporations can be held responsible under international law. Less attention is paid to the question of what leads corporations to...

This paper, written in 2012, provides a summary of the corporate law tools project undertaken as part of the mandate of Professor John Ruggie as Special Representative for Business and Human Rights. The author was one of the co-convenors of a multi-stakeholder consultation on corporate law tools...