Digital Commons Network^™

Can Bad Law Do Good? A Retrospective On Conflict Minerals Regulation, Karen E. Woody

Karen Woody

Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (“Dodd-Frank”) created a novel approach to corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) in supply chains by requiring public companies to disclose the presence of conflict minerals in their products. Dodd-Frank, as a whole, has faced a barrage of criticism since its passage, and Section 1502 was not immune from intense critical backlash. As I argued in prior scholarship and congressional testimony, Section 1502 was ill-conceived in substance and form. Its application resulted in the improper use of securities laws to the detriment of its laudable public international law …

Can Bad Law Do Good? A Retrospective On Conflict Minerals Regulation, Karen E. Woody

Maryland Law Review

Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (“Dodd-Frank”) created a novel approach to corporate social responsibility (“CSR”) in supply chains by requiring public companies to disclose the presence of conflict minerals in their products. Dodd-Frank, as a whole, has faced a barrage of criticism since its passage, and Section 1502 was not immune from intense critical backlash. As I argued in prior scholarship and congressional testimony, Section 1502 was ill-conceived in substance and form. Its application resulted in the improper use of securities laws to the detriment of its laudable public international law …

Finding A Forest Through The Trees: Georgia-Pacific As Guidance For Arbitration Of International Compulsory Licensing Disputes, Karen Mckenzie

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

This paper will examine the challenges of international compulsory licensing by examining the issue historically and legally as well as offer possible solutions. Thus, this paper will explore the challenge of balancing corporate interests against the affordability and availability of pharmaceuticals by focusing on discrete situations in developing countries, the history of compulsory licensing, and how the World Health Organization (the “WHO”) and the WTO have attempted to tackle these challenges through compulsory licensing, and it will suggest a possible framework for use in arbitration, which balances equities through a Georgia-Pacific analysis.

Can “Imfcoin” Be Scaruffi's Moneta Immaginaria?, Alexander M. Heideman

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

Cryptocurrencies have taken the world by storm. But these decentralized and unregulated digital fiat currencies have more in common with the currencies of ages past than many believe. These commonalities may result in the incorporation of new cryptocurrencies into older institutions. One such institution is the International Monetary Fund's Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), which has bene relegated to an afterthought in the international monetary system since the Nixon Shock in 1971. The Fund's Managing Director recently made comments that indicated that the Fund is exploring the incorporation of a cryptocurrency into the framework of the SDR, a change which China …

Interstitial Space Law, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

Conventionally, customary international law is developed through the actions and beliefs of nations. International treaties are interpreted, in part, by assessing how the parties to the treaty behave. This Article observes that these forms of uncodified international law—custom and subsequent treaty practice—are also developed through a nation’s reactions, or failures to react, to acts and beliefs that can be attributed to it. I call this “attributed lawmaking.”

Consider the new commercial space race. Innovators like SpaceX and Blue Origin seek a permissive legal environment. A Cold-War-era treaty does not seem adequately to address contemporary plans for space. The treaty does, …

Reflecting On Straight Talk On Trade, Alvaro Santos

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A question that motivates this essay is: What insights can we offer from legal scholarship that Dani Rodrik could take on board and put to good use?

Rodrik is an economist, but he might as well have been a lawyer in the way he builds his argument and anticipates counterarguments. I mean that as a compliment. As a bonus, he delivers the punch line with humor and grace. In his book I recognized several of the many contributions Rodrik has made: his argument for policy space and revitalization of industrial policy, the globalization trilemma, the idea and process of growth …

Developing Countries And International Economic Law: The Case Of Burma, Vincent R. Johnson

Faculty Articles

Roughly a quarter of a century ago, developing countries, in large numbers, signed on to the 1994 revision of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade3 ("GKTT 1994") and to membership in its umbrella institution, the World Trade Organization ("WTO"). Notwithstanding their erstwhile reluctance to do business with and compete against developed countries that in many instances had been colonial oppressors, they took on substantial obligations under the WTO agreements. Developing countries did so, in part, because they feared being left behind economically in a world where free trade prospered.

Fragmentation, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

A danger, an opportunity, passé, a cliché, destabilizing, empowering, destructive, creative: Depending on whom you ask, fragmentation has meant any and all of these for international law. The concept of fragmentation has been a mirror reflecting international lawyers’ perception of themselves, their field, and its prospects for the future.

This chapter chronicles fragmentation’s meanings over the past few decades. In particular, it focuses on the spreading fears of fragmentation around the millennium, how the fears were eventually repurposed, where, speculatively, those fear may have gone, and how and to what extent faith in international law was restored.

...And Trade, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

This short essay, part of a symposium on Gregory Shaffer’s Retooling Trade Agreements for Social Inclusion, argues that the normal science of trade law lacks the tools to confront trade law’s greatest current challenges. Instead, breaking out of trade law’s two-step politics, with its division of “growing the pie” and distributing its slices, and responding to new challenges of climate change, the digital economy, and artificial intelligence will require a new politics built on and designed to build new shared narratives embodying new policy paradigms.

The Cisg: Applicable Law And Applicable Forums, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

Despite being in effect for over thirty years, a debate continues on whether the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) has been a success. With 89 Contracting States, it clearly is widely accepted. At the same time, empirical studies show that private parties regularly opt out of its application. It has served as a model for domestic sales law, and as an important educational tool. But has it been a success? In this article I consider that question, and suggests that the scorecard is not yet complete; and that it will perhaps take significantly …

Online Dispute Resolution, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This chapter was prepared from a presentation given by the author at the 2019 Summer School in Transnational Commercial Law & Technology, jointly sponsored by the University of Verona School of Law and the Center for International Legal Education (CILE) of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. In the paper, I review online dispute resolution (ODR) by considering the following five questions, which I believe help to develop a better understanding of both the concept and the legal framework surrounding it:

A. What is ODR?

B. Who does ODR?

C. What is the legal framework for ODR?

D. What …

Competition Enforcement, Trade And Global Governance: A Few Comments, Petros C. Mavroidis, Damien J. Neven

Faculty Scholarship

The debate on international antitrust has come from two perspectives. On the one hand, the trade community has emphasised the interface between trade policy and competition (policy and) enforcement. This interface, which was recognised from the outset of multilateral efforts to liberalise trade in what would become the GATT and eventually the WTO, focuses on the prospect that trade liberalisation through border instruments should not be undone by restrictive business practices (RBPs), placing a particular responsibility in this respect on competition enforcement. On the other hand, the antitrust community has emphasised the risk of inefficient enforcement when several jurisdictions can …