Law and Economics Commons^™

The Right To Food Comes To America, Wendy Heipt

Journal of Food Law & Policy

The people of Maine recently exercised an opportunity no citizen of this country has ever had before: the ability to vote on whether to enshrine a right to food in their state constitution. This Essay provides an overview of Maine’s experience with food rights in order to explain how the state came to occupy this unique position.

Voices From Below—Africa’S Contribution To The Development Of The Norm Of Corporate Responsibility To Respect Human Rights, Akinwumi Olawuyi Ogunranti

PhD Dissertations

The long conversations about corporate responsibility predominantly take place in forums and conferences in the Global North. Yet, the majority of the human rights abuses and their impacts are felt by peasants, farmers, children, and women in local communities in the Global South who do not have a voice in the institutionalized governance systems that animate global affairs. This thesis answers the question of how norms and human rights institutions in Africa can influence the corporate responsibility to respect (CR2R) norm as embedded in pillar II of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Through the theory …

Responsible Business Conduct In The Extractive Industries: Prospect Of Respecting Women's Human Rights In Ghana, Veronica Dossah

LLM Theses

Business operations in the extractive industries (EI) continue to violate women’s human rights and the environment in the communities in which they operate. In Ghana, existing laws and regulations do not preclude businesses from such violations. This makes it important to reflect on innovative means including soft laws which could encourage companies operating in the EI in Ghana to respect women’s human rights and the environment over and above compliance with national laws and regulations. This thesis examines the problem of land grabbing by EI companies operating in Ghana, the unique negative impacts women in mining communities face as a …

Mining And The Sdgs: A 2020 Status Update, Responsible Mining Foundation, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

In September 2015, the UN member states agreed on a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which represent the global agenda for equitable, socially inclusive, and environmentally sustainable economic development until 2030. Mining companies have the potential to become leading partners in achieving the SDGs. Through their direct operations, mining companies can generate profits, employment, and economic growth in low-income countries. And through partnerships with government and civil society, mining companies can ensure that benefits of mining extend beyond the life of the mine itself, so that the mining industry has a positive impact on the natural environment, climate …

Electric Utility Alignment With The Sdgs & The Paris Climate Agreement, Perrine Toledano, Aniket Shah, Nicolas Maennling, Ryan J. Lasnick

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda poses a unique and critical challenge to the energy sector: how to scale access to clean energy to power sustainable, economic development for a growing population, while simultaneously decarbonizing global energy supply. Expanding access to clean energy will play a crucial role in achieving nearly every one of the Sustainable Development Goals, including those related to agricultural production, health outcomes, educational performance, water systems, access to infrastructure, and reducing inequalities. However, practices by some actors in the energy sector, and continued over-reliance on greenhouse gas-intensive fossil fuels also undermine global efforts to mitigate climate change …

Human Rights Law And The Investment Treaty Regime, Jesse Coleman, Kaitlin Y. Cordes, Lise Johnson

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

In its current form, the international investment treaty regime may stymie the business and human rights agenda in various ways. The regime may incentivize governments to favour the protection of investors over the protection of human rights. Investment treaty standards enforced through investor-state arbitration risk adversely affecting access to justice for project-affected rights holders. More broadly, the regime contributes to a system of global economic governance that elevates and rewards investors’ actions and expectations, irrespective of whether they have adhered to their responsibilities to respect human rights. Without comprehensive reform, investment treaties and investor-state arbitration will continue to interfere with …

Cost-Benefit Analysis And Human Rights, William J. Aceves

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

This Article considers whether cost-benefit analysis can provide the human rights movement with the answers it seeks. It offers an instrumentalist and empirical approach to complement the normative arguments that are most often used by the human rights movement. If human rights could be fully monetized, states could consider the full range of benefits that arise from protecting rights and the costs that occur when rights are violated. This approach could provide states with a more accurate methodology for making decisions that affect human rights. In fact, protecting human rights may prove to be costeffective, particularly when second order …

Privatizing The Reservation?, Kristen A. Carpenter, Angela R. Riley

Publications

The problems of American Indian poverty and reservation living conditions have inspired various explanations. One response advanced by some economists and commentators, which may be gaining traction within the Trump Administration, calls for the “privatization” of Indian lands. Proponents of this view contend that reservation poverty is rooted in the federal Indian trust arrangement, which preserves the tribal land base by limiting the marketability of lands within reservations. In order to maximize wealth on reservations, policymakers are advocating for measures that would promote the individuation and alienability of tribal lands, while diminishing federal and tribal oversight.

Taking a different view, …

Why Central Banks Need To Take Human Rights More Seriously, Daniel D. Bradlow

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Most central bankers think that there is a tenuous connection between the operations of central banks and human rights. Their responsibility is to concentrate on the relatively narrow set of macro-economic variables that are relevant to their mandates and to leave to their country’s political leadership the decisions dealing with the complex and politically sensitive variables that affect the functioning of the economy and society.

This position is no longer tenable. Climate change is forcing the central banking community to rethink their view of their responsibilities. The recent release of the Network for Greening, the Financial System’s first comprehensive report …

The "Common Word," Development, And Human Rights: African And Catholic Perspectives, Joseph M. Isanga

Joseph Isanga

Africa is the most conflict-ridden region of the world and has been since the end of the Cold War. The Continent's performance in both development and human rights continues to lag behind other regions in the world. Such condi­tions can cause religious differences to escalate into conflict, particularly where religious polarity is susceptible to being exploited. The sheer scale of such con­flicts underscores the urgency and significance of interreligious engagement and dialogue: 'Quantitative and qualitative analysis based on a ... database including 28 violent conflicts show that religion plays a role more frequently than is usually assumed.' This ambivalent character …

Resourcing Green Technologies Through Smart Mineral Enterprise Development: A Case Analysis Of Cobalt, Saleem Ali, Perrine Toledano, Nicolas Maennling, Nathaniel Hoffman, Lola Aganga

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement requires the world to adopt ‘green technologies’ such as renewable energies and electric transportation at an unprecedented scale. While many countries have implemented policies to spur the adoption of such technologies, a lack of focus has been placed on the sourcing of minerals that are required as inputs. As a result, there is likely to be a significant deficit that may constrain the adoption of green technologies.

In this report, we argue that a neglected area in addressing the mineral scarcity challenge is the private sector’s current trajectory for geological mineral exploration and …

Book Review: Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation By Renate Klein, Kate Rose

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

No abstract provided.

Rethinking The "Less As More" Thesis: Supranational Litigation Of Economic, Social And Cultural Rights In The Americas, Tara J. Melish

Tara Melish

In their 2005 law review article Less as More: Rethinking Supranational Litigation of Economic and Social Rights in the Americas, James Cavallaro and Emily Schaffer argue for a "rethinking" of strategies to advance economic, social and cultural rights in the Americas. They posit that to achieve higher rates of real-world protection for such rights, social rights advocates should do two things: first, bring less litigation and, second, frame any marginal litigation that is pursued as violations of classic civil and political rights. According to the authors, this recommended course will increase the "legitimacy" of the litigation and lead to higher …

Using A Shield As A Sword: Are International Organizations Abusing Their Immunity?, Daniel D. Bradlow

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The starting point for this paper is that IOs are as subjects of international law. Since IOs do not control territory or a population and so always operate within the jurisdiction of one of their member states, they are vulnerable to interference by their member states. In order to mitigate this risk, IOs have been granted qualified immunity, usually referred to as functional immunity, from the jurisdiction of their member states. For most of the twentieth century, this grant of functional immunity made sense for two reasons.

First, the founding states envisaged that IOs would have limited capacity to act …

Transparency Evolution: More Than The Right To Know, Ljiljana Biuković, Pitman B. Potter

All Faculty Publications

Providing an analysis of global regulation and the impact of international organizations on domestic laws, this collection grew out of a central objective to explore methods of domestic engagement with international trade and human rights norms, and the inherent difficulties in establishing balanced links between these two international law regimes. The common thread of the papers in this collection is a focus on the application of socio-legal normative paradigms in building knowledge and policy support for coordinating local performance with international trade and human rights standards in ways that are mutually sustaining.

Conference Report: Climate Change And Sustainable Investment In Natural Resources: From Consensus To Action, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment, Sustainable Development Solutions Network, Sabin Center For Climate Change Law

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment has produced this conference report on CCSI’s Conference on Climate Change and Sustainable Investment in Natural Resources: From Consensus to Action. A shorter outcome document, which was disseminated at COP22, is also available. These documents summarize the discussions at the eleventh annual Columbia International Investment Conference, which took place on November 2-3, 2016, at Columbia University. The Conference offered a high-level opportunity to discuss how countries can reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement, while also advancing the Sustainable Development Goals, and in particular the important implications for the …

Mapping Mining To The Sustainable Development Goals: An Atlas, Columbia Center On Sustainable Investment, Sustainable Development Solutions Network, United Nations Development Programme, World Economic Forum

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

CCSI has been working with the World Economic Forum, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) to create a shared understanding of how the mining industry can most effectively contribute to the SDGs. The report will help mining companies navigate where their activities – from exploration, through operations and mine closure – can help the world achieve the SDGs. Governments, civil society and other stakeholders can also identify opportunities for shared action and partnership with the industry.

A draft report of Mapping Mining to the Sustainable Development Goals: A Preliminary Atlas was released for …

Employment From Mining And Agricultural Investments: How Much Myth, How Much Reality?, Kaitlin Y. Cordes, Olle Östensson, Perrine Toledano

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Employment creation is often seen as a key benefit of investment in natural resources. However, this benefit sometimes falls short: job estimates may be inflated, governmental policies may fail to maximize employment generation, and, in some cases, investments may lead to net livelihood losses. A more thorough examination of employment tied to mining and agricultural investments is thus useful for assessing whether and how employment from natural resource investments contributes to sustainable economic development – a particularly timely topic as countries consider how they will achieve the Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015.

This report aims to clarify the processes …

Transformations In Statehood, The Investor- State Regime, And The New Constitutionalism, A. Claire Cutler

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This paper examines the changing boundaries of statehood resulting from transformations in the nature and operation of public and private authority over local and global politico-legal orders. Transformations in the political purposes of states are being driven by powerful elites who advance a new form of constitutional governance. New constitutionalism, as evidenced by the investor-state regime, subordinates the interests, purposes, and rights of national citizens to those of foreign, transnational politico-legal, and economic elites. This regime is a highly privatized order that is expanding in influence, both in terms of the commercial activities under its remit, and in terms of …

To Whom It May Concern: International Human Rights Law And Global Public Goods, Daniel Augenstein

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Public goods and human rights are sometimes treated as intimately related, if not interchangeable, strategies to address matters of common global concern. The aim of the present contribution is to disentangle the two notions to shed some critical light on their respective potential to attend to contemporary problems of globalization. I distinguish the standard economic approach to public goods as a supposedly value-neutral technique to coordinate economic activity between states and markets from a political conception of human rights law that empowers individuals to partake in the definition of the public good. On this basis, I contend that framing global …

Can Parallel Lines Ever Meet? The Strange Case Of The International Standards On Sovereign Debt And Business And Human Rights, Daniel D. Bradlow

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This special issue is a cooperation of the Yale Journal of International Law and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). It emerged from UNCTAD’s work on sovereign debt workouts, specifically from its Working Group on a Sovereign Debt Workout Mechanism (2013 to 2015). The working group developed a Roadmap and Guide for Sovereign Debt Workouts, published in 2015. It proposes an incremental approach to sovereign debt workouts that relies on the continuous, progressive development of sovereign debt restructuring practice. This work has inspired the adoption of Basic Principles for Sovereign Debt Restructuring by the United Nations General …

Religiosity In Constitutions And The Status Of Minority Rights, Brandy G. Robinson

Cultural Encounters, Conflicts, and Resolutions

Minority rights and religion have never been topics that are simultaneously considered. However, arguably, the two have relevance, especially when combined with the topic and theory of constitutionalism. Historically and traditionally, minorities have been granted certain rights and have been denied certain rights under various constitutions. These grants and denials relate to cultural differences and values, arguably relating to a culture’s understanding and interpretation of religion.

This article explores the relationship and status of minority rights as it relates to religiosity and constitutionalism. Essentially, there is a correlation between these topics and research shows where certain nations have used religion …

China's Human Rights Record Since Tiananmen 1989 And The Recent Mixed Response Of The United States, Daniel C. Turack

Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law

No abstract provided.

Toward Win-Win Sustainable Development, Linda Moon

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

An interview with Lisa Sachs, Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment.

Nuclear Chain Reaction: Why Economic Sanctions Are Not Worth The Public Costs, Nicholas C.W. Wolfe

Nicholas A Wolfe

International economic sanctions frequently violate human rights in targeted states and rarely achieve their objectives. However, many hail economic sanctions as an important nonviolent tool for coercing and persuading change. In November 2013, the Islamic Republic of Iran negotiated a temporary agreement with major world powers regarding Iran’s nuclear program. The United States’ media and politicians have repeatedly and incorrectly attributed Iran’s willingness to negotiate to the effectiveness of economic sanctions.

Politicians primarily focus on immediate domestic effects and enact sanctions without a thorough understanding of the long-term effects on the United States economy and the public within a targeted …

South Dakota: Making Dollars And Sense Of Indian Child Removal, Rachael Whitaker

Rachael Whitaker

South Dakota- Making Dollars and Sense of Indian Child Removal By: Rachael Whitaker In 2004, a South Dakota Governor’s Commission report adamantly denied claims that the state’s Department of Social Services (DSS) is “harvesting Indian children as a cash crop” and “runs nothing more than a state sponsored kidnapping program.” National Public Radio (NPR) broke a story in 2011, claiming South Dakota removed Indian children for profit. Since NPR’s report, the state has remained tight-lipped, advocates have threatened litigation, and Congress has asked for answers. South Dakota has a small population and economy, and it receives almost half of its …

Overview And Operation Of U.S. Financial Sanctions, Including The Example Of Iran, Barry E. Carter, Ryan Farha

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Financial sanctions are increasingly being used in the mix of international economic sanctions being employed by the United Nations, regional entities, and individual countries, including the United States. These financial sanctions have become more focused and effective as the tools and techniques have improved significantly for tracing and identifying the financial transactions of terrorists, weapons proliferators, human rights violators, drug cartels, and others. These sanctions can not only freeze financial assets and prohibit or limit financial transactions, but they also impede trade by making it difficult to pay for the export or import of goods and services.

In spite of …

Emerging Law Addressing Climate Change And Water, Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

The World Economic Forum recognizes that while restrictions on energy affect water systems and vice versa, energy and water policy are rarely coordinated. The International Panel on Climate Change predicts that wet places will become wetter and dry places will become dryer. Transboundary water, energy and climate coordination can occur through international consensus building.

Human Rights Law On Trial In The Drc, William Paul Simmons

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The ongoing tragedy in Eastern Congo contains so many tragic lessons that it should shake to their very foundations all comfortable ideologies about human rights and politics. The atrocities in the DRC should implicate all but have so far resulted in almost limitless impunity. Here, I briefly put human rights law on trial for its role in perpetuating this tragedy.

Adding Social Condition To The Canadian Human Rights Act, A. Wayne Mackay, Natasha Kim

Reports & Public Policy Documents

Almost a decade ago, in June 2000, the Canadian Human Rights Act Review Panel conducted a comprehensive review of the Canadian Human Rights Act [CHRA] and recommended that “social condition” be added as a prohibited ground of discrimination. Since then, no action has been taken to implement this recommendation, despite calls for action from international bodies, political actors, human rights agencies and organizations, and academic commentators to provide protections from discrimination for those suffering from social and economic disadvantage. The authors analyze the experiences at the provincial level with socio-economic grounds of discrimination, jurisprudential developments under the Canadian Charter of …