Law Commons^™

Corporations As Semi-States, Jay Butler

Faculty Publications

When Ebola came to West Africa in 2014, Liberia could not cope. The State’s already fragile public health infrastructure was largely ineffective in responding to the illness and preventing its spread. And, the World Health Organization’s support was slow and stilted. By contrast, Firestone, a tire company that operates a vast rubber plantation in Liberia and runs its own hospital for 80,000 employees, family dependents, and persons in neighboring localities, responded to the virus much more effectively.

This Article uses Firestone’s Ebola response as an entry point to study a phenomenon too frequently overlooked. Many for-profit firms that maintain operations …

Book Review: Global Lawmakers: International Organizations In The Crafting Of World Markets By Susan Block-Lieb And Terence C. Halliday, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

Susan Block-Lieb and Terence Halliday gradually build up an empirically grounded, meticulously realized argument that individual lawmakers matter. When one allows facts to inform theory rather than the other way around, the authors show, what becomes clear is that individual lawmakers are not just governmental delegates, but a whole variety of professionals, industry association representatives, and others with some stake in the lawmaking process. These actors work not just through formal processes, but also through an array of informal ones. Most importantly, their presence matters to the content of the legal norms that take hold around the world. The book …