Lawyers in the Shadow of the Regulatory State: Transnational Governance on Business and Human Rights

Lawyers are beginning to play an important role in strengthening the system of transnational governance that regulates business and human rights. In setting the background to our discussion of lawyers’ role in this context, Part I of this Article provides a general overview of the emergence of the transnational governance regime. Part II then describes some of the governance instruments that attempt to prevent and rectify the adverse human rights impacts of business activities. Part III discusses the extent to which lawyers are advising their business clients on human rights issues, the factors that may inhibit or encourage the provision of such advice, and how the lawyers who are raising these issues are framing these discussions with their clients. Finally, Part IV suggests further areas of inquiry that may enrich our understanding of the role that lawyers can play in helping construct a transnational governance regime on business and human rights

Divorce Reform and the Legacy of Gender

A Review of The Illusion of Equality: The Rhetoric and Reality of Divorce Reform by Martha Albertson Finema

Getting Our Stories Straight: Narrative Autonomy and Feminist Commitments

Symposium: Law and Civil Societ

Ethics, Law Firms, and Legal Education

A rash of recent corporate scandals has once again put professional ethics in the spotlight. It\u27s hard to pick up the Wall Street Journal each day and not read that authorities have launched a new investigation or that additional indictments are imminent. Stories of financial fraud and outright looting have galvanized the public and shaken the economy. What ethical lessons can we draw from these events? Two explanations seem especially prominent. The first is a story of individuals without an adequate moral compass. Some people\u27s greed and ambition were unchecked by any internal ethical constraints. For such deviants, no amount of money was enough and no level of consumption too high. One trader at Enron, for instance, reportedly paid $6250 a month for an especially desirable parking space. For people like that, the basic problem was flawed character. The lesson is that we need to make greater efforts to transmit moral values and sensitize people to basic ethical precepts. The second story is of individuals who did have a sense of right and wrong, but who buckled under organizational pressure. Enron pushed its executives to devise ever more questionable schemes to keep apparent profits growing and its stock price high. Arthur Andersen auditors felt pressure to accept Enron\u27s numbers in order to preserve millions in consulting fees from the company. In this story, some people knew the right thing to do, but lacked the fortitude to do it. The problem therefore was organizational corruption. The lesson is that we need to provide people in organizations greater protection from retaliation for sticking to their values

Toward conservational anthropology: addressing anthropocentric bias in anthropology

Anthropological literature addressing conservation and development often blames 'conservationists' as being neo-imperialist in their attempts to institute limits to commercial activities by imposing their post-materialist eco-ideology. The author argues that this view of conservationists is ironic in light of the fact that the very notion of 'development' is arguably an imposition of the (Western) elites. The anthropocentric bias in anthropology also permeates constructivist ethnographies of human-animal 'interactions,' which tend to emphasize the socio-cultural complexity and interconnectivity rather than the unequal and often extractive nature of this 'interaction.' Anthropocentrism is argued to be counteractive to reconciling conservationists' efforts at environmental protection with the traditional ontologies of the interdependency of human-nature relationship