Law Commons^™

Multilateralism, Pushback, And Prospects For Global Engagement?, Michael Donald Kirby The Honourable

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In this article, the author draws on long engagement with multilateralism, both in domestic jurisdiction and international institutions. He describes the growth of post-War United Nations activities and the increasing impact of international law, including on universal human rights. He records international initiatives on global problems like HI V/AIDS and in individual countries, such as Cambodia and North Korea. He then describes recent examples of '"pushback" against multilateralism, especially on the part of the United States, the United Kingdom, some European countries, and Australia. He concludes with illustrations and reasons why the global community should remain optimistic about multilateralism, despite …

World Trade, Imperial Fantasies And Protectionism: Can You Really Have Your Cake And Eat It Too?, Csongor I. Nagy

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Populism is telling voters what they want to hear, knowing that it is neither true, nor feasible. Lately, trade and economic integration has seen the spread of untrue and unfeasible tenets, which have proved to be highly popular and have received a warm welcome. Fueled by imperial fantasies and nostalgia for the long-gone era of protectionism, the tectonic movements of world trade have generated a good deal of populist resistance based on the self-delusion that the Gordian knot of world trade needs not to be disentangled but can be simply cut. Unfortunately, however popular and appealing these allegations are, they …

Trump, Trade, And Trabajo: Renegotiating Nafta's Labor Accord In A Fraught Political Climate, Lance A. Compa

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Quitting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and demanding renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)- along with its supplemental labor pact, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC)-were among the first actions of the new U.S. Administration in 2017. NAFTA renegotiations concluded for the time being-in October 2018 with announcement of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to replace NAFTA.

Controversial proposals on the bargaining table contained important implications for employment, labor rights, and labor standards in North America. This paper reviews the status of negotiations, the risks of losing the first-ever international instrument linking trade and labor standards …

Globalization: The Next 25 Years (Introduction), Alfred C. Aman

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

A warm welcome to you all. Thank you for your participation in this very special milestone for this Journal. As you know, this symposium conference marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journal. Our first symposium conference was entitled "The Globalization of Law, Politics and Markets." Those papers were published in our first issue. I went back to that first issue not long ago, and found these lines:

"We currently stand at a watershed in the public law history of the United States. We have moved from local and state common-law, regulatory regimes that dominated the 19th and early 20th centuries, …

Three Theses On The Current Crisis Of International Liberalism, David S. Grewal

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This essay advances three theses on the current crisis of international liberalism. First, it is a composite one, comprising interrelated crises of domestic political representation and of global governance affecting the international and supranational arrangements that were constructed in the post-war period. Second, the crisis is a specific development of neoliberal governance, which requires distinguishing international liberalism's two historical variants: "embedded liberalism" and "neoliberalism." The turn from the post-war regime of "embedded liberalism" to the "neoliberalism" of recent decades has had the effect of undoing the domestic social contracts that underlay post-war political stability even while failing to secure peace …

Environmental Standards Within Nafta: Difference By Design And The Retreat From Harmonization, Jeffrey Atik

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Professor Atik argues that NAFTA, in legitimating regulatory differences among the NAFTA parties, represents a repudiation of standard harmonization. He states that while NAFTA and its environmental side agreement "have been described as the 'greenest' trade agreement to date," it marks a significant retreatfrom efforts to harmonize global environmental standards. This rejection is a product of "ajealous retention of sovereignty" by the NAFTA parties, as well as the careful maintenance of the parties' distinct production roles and specialities. Thus, Professor Atik argues that a convergence of standards will likely remain elusive within NAFTA. Both highstandard and low-standard parties may prefer …

The Puzzling Relationship Between Trade And Environment: Nafta, Competitiveness, And The Pursuit Of Environmental Welfare Objectives, Ileana M. Porras

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is often claimed to be a "promising beginning" for the reconciliation of trade and environment. Professor Porras, however, suggests that the form that "reconciliation" takes in NAFTA is extremely problematic. Harmonization of standards to facilitate the free flow of trade is a familiar trade goal. NAFTA's provisions regarding environmental standards, however, are not a straightforward requirement to harmonize standards. Rather, NAFTA recognizes state autonomy in standard setting, on the one hand, while requiring a form of upward harmonization, on the other. According to Professor Porras, the result of such an arrangement is the …

Border Crossings: Nafta, Regulatory Restructuring, And The Politics Of Place, Ruth Buchanan

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Professor Buchanan begins her paper by questioning whether

recent economic and political shifts towards notions of

"globalization" (e.g., the NAFTA) have failed to consider the

politics or economics of change in particular places. Her prime

example of a "place" where integration is illogically forced against

a background of differentiation is the U.S.-Mexico border region.

Through the scope of a "regulatory complex" (a complex of legal,

institutional, regulatory, and social orderings), she departs from the

common view of the NAFTA as a productive tool of North American

integration, and instead views the NAFTA as exacerbating

"differences between localities, industries, and labor …