Transnational Legal Orders for Private Law and Business Regulation

Wednesday–Thursday, May 13–14, 2015
UC Irvine School of Law
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This symposium assesses and evaluates the extent of change in private law and business regulation that transcends the nation state. Such law and regulation seek to produce order in an issue area that relevant actors construe as a problem. These problems range from labor rights of garment workers to food safety; to securities fraud and financial crises; to corporate social responsibility; to the allocation of authority among courts to hear transnational disputes. The legal norms adopt various legal forms and they vary in their formally binding nature. The legal norms are transnational insofar as they transcend and permeate state boundaries, since the problems are deemed difficult or impossible to address by a single nation state. National legislatures often do not play a central role in many of these areas.

The symposium evaluates developments in these areas, and the challenges and limits various initiatives face. The symposium brings leading legal theorists and empirical scholars from different countries into dialogue. The participants will engage, in particular, with the theoretical lens of “transnational legal orders” as elaborated in the new book by Terence Halliday and Gregory Shaffer, Transnational Legal Orders (Cambridge University Press 2015).

Hosted by the Center on Globalization, Law and Society, an umbrella center for the study of international, transnational and comparative law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law.

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Participants