Most scholars attribute the development and ubiquity of global value chains to economic forces, treating law as an exogenous factor, if at all. By contrast, we assert the centrality of legal regimes and private ordering mechanisms to the creation, structure, geography, distributive effects and...

Commerce, in its pre-industrial form, consisted overwhelmingly of one-to-one relationships. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, however, technological and political advances led to the outsourcing and offshoring of many of the activities necessary for the production of goods....

Several corporate disclosure and due diligence laws related to the social and environmental impacts of globalized production have been enacted across the world over the last decade. While the emergence, operation and impact of such ‘transnational sustainability laws’ have already been...

Corporate groups are giving way to contractually organized global value chains, and any effective approach to regulating sustainability must thus account for contractually organized production. This chapter outlines the move from corporate governance to governance through contract in organizing...

Our focus is on the legal conceptualization of greenhouse gas emissions from transnational production. Apportioning greenhouse gas emissions from transnational production to specific private actors, to say nothing of related governance, regulatory and liability issues, poses a challenge for the...

This chapter focuses on the role of law on sustainability agency. Earlier research has focused primarily on law as an instrument for calibrating existing agency towards sustainability ex post, for example through regulatory interventions geared towards steering actors towards lower carbon...

In this paper we chart how society-at-large and private law in particular strive to understand production and related responsibilities and liabilities from a holistic perspective. Technological, ideological, and legal developments have led to the rise of new forms of institutionalized...

Alongside bilateral one-off transactions, contracts are used to govern the dynamic, multi-tiered production networks that constitute a majority of global commerce today. Contract law and theory do not reflect this change in contractual modalities. In this paper, we look first to summarize...