Development

Development is about aspiration—our longing for a better life as individuals and as a community—and respect, as we individually and collectively recognize and support these aspirations. Development requires the freedom to define and choose that better life; a fair share of the resources needed to realize that life; and narratives of where we currently stand with regard to our aspirations and why, where we want to go, and what it will take to get there. This means that development inevitably takes place in and through politics, law, and the social sciences (especially economics), as we work to articulate our claims and understand how development can occur sustainably within an environment of finite resources. Development raises difficult issues of causality, path dependence, responsibility and justice, which can and have led to urgent and painful conflicts. However, globalization and recent innovative thinking on development may herald a new “post-national” development discourse in which we no longer arbitrarily distinguish between the “local” and the “global,” opening the way to increased understanding and cooperation towards deeply shared aims, and a more just global order, meaning inclusive, effective investment in human capabilities for everyone

Introduction: Globalization, Power, States, and the Role of Law

On October 12, 2012 the Boston College Law Review and the Boston College International and Comparative Law Review held a joint Symposium entitled, “Filling Power Vacuums in the New Global Legal Order.” In three panel discussions and a keynote address by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a lively discourse on the impact of globalization on state power, the law, and the law’s ability to both reallocate and effectively restrain power ensued. This Introduction, and the works that follow in this symposium issue, document that discourse

Globalization, Global Community and the Possibility of Global Justice

In this essay, I suggest five ways in which globalization is changing the cosmopolitan/communitarian debate over global justice, by creating, both inter-subjectively and at the regulatory level, the constitutive elements of a limited global community. Members of this global community are increasingly aware of each other’s needs and circumstances, increasingly capable of effectively addressing these needs, and increasingly contributing to these circumstances in the first place. They find themselves involved in the same global market society, and together these members look to the same organizations, especially those at the meta-state level, to provide regulatory approaches to addressing problems of global social policy. Thus in global social relations we can begin to see that minimum level of “community” necessary to support relations of justice, at least in certain areas, even if it does not manifest that level of community necessary to speak of “global community” in the fullest communitarian sense

Humanizing the Financial Architecture of Globalization: A Tribute to the Work of Cynthia Lichtenstein

This Tribute reviews the many contributions by Cynthia Lichtenstein to the literature on international financial markets. When viewed as a whole, Professor Lichtenstein\u27s work suggests that the globalization of the monetary system offers new opportunities for increased human welfare, but only if state and international regulators combine technical expertise with a genuine understanding of the human effects of global markets, much as Professor Lichtenstein does in her own work

Third-Party Funding as Exploitation of the Investment Treaty System

Third-party funding of international investment arbitration is on the rise. Through TPF funders will cover the legal fees of investors filing claims under investment treaties in exchange for a portion of the arbitral award. Proponents of third-party funding claim that it provides access to justice for parties that normally would not have the funds to arbitrate against state actors. Given that the international investment law that governs these claims is unbalanced, and that funding only flows towards investor-claimants, and at the expense of states and their taxpayers, allowing third-party funding in investment arbitration risks creating unjustifiable wealth transfers from the citizens of target states for the benefit of speculators. Reform is needed to prevent the deleterious effects of third-party funding on developing and newly-industrialized states and on the investment law regime itself

Rethinking Trade Law in an Era of Trump and Brexit

International trade and economic globalization are in crisis. In the U.S. and elsewhere, current regimes like NAFTA and the EU, and trade deals like the TTIP and the TPP, have become targets for the political backlash against trade and its larger context, economic globalization. Brexit and the 2016 U.S. election remind us that many feel betrayed by current trade policies, that free trade is being imposed on them at their cost but for others’ benefit. At the heart of this crisis, however, there are as always opportunities. First, we have an opportunity to return to trade’s roots in consent. Trade is nothing more or less than the economic bargains we agree to, and the rules we agree on to protect, support and facilitate these bargains. However, by this standard much of what passes today for trade is not really trade at all but something else: coercion, exploitation, or worse. Second, we have an opportunity to look below the surface of contemporary events, where deeper underlying trends point towards the early days of a larger, more inclusive set of socioeconomic relationships we can call global market society. These two lines of investigation themselves converge into the present inquiry: what kind of trade regulation does a global market society need in order to flourish? How is that different from conventional, contemporary “trade” agreements? And how do we support the most vulnerable workers and others marginalized by economic globalization in the process of collectively pursuing these economic and social opportunities? If the heart of trade is consensual economic exchange, then this has ramifications throughout the entire social framework we use to recognize, support, protect and facilitate consensual economic exchanges