This chapter aims to inform reflection on business self-regulation (or corporate social responsibility, CSR) in addressing climate change by drawing on developments in ‘business and human rights’ and the experience accumulated in the European Union (EU). Despite dissimilarities in addressing the environmental and human right impacts of business operations, there are commonalities around incentives, impacts and regulatory dynamics of CSR that help clarify its expected place in global governance. This analysis revisits long-standing claims about CSR in light of current legal and market evolutions. The main finding is that the notion of CSR has been fundamentally transformed in the last 20 years. What is the change, what are the drivers enabling such change, and what are the expected impacts on corporate compliance and sustainability performance? The analysis contributes to the regulatory governance area, including regarding climate change, and promotes cross-fertilisation among the social and environmental areas in CSR.

Fiduciaries frequently confront transnational situations. Lawyers – an archetypal class of fiduciary – have long counseled participants in cross-border transactions and conducted their own activities transnationally.1 Financial institutions – firms that often act in a fiduciary capacity2 – have provided products transnationally for centuries.3

This chapter shows how involuntary sterilisation and castration have become problematised in international law. The chapter discusses the rise of international law and human rights in the post-war context. Despite being regarded as international crimes on meeting certain criteria since the Nuremberg trials, the interventions are rarely prosecuted in practice. Efforts to mainstream involuntary sterilisation as human rights violations have been more successful. This development began in the 1990s and has since gone from soft law to binding legal obligations. The chapter shows that uncertainty prevails regarding the legal and remedial conceptualisation of involuntary sterilisation and castration in international human rights law due to inconsistent and incidental treatment of such cases. Ultimately, the argument is made that international law provides a socio-legal master frame for national legal claims. In the case of involuntary sterilisation and castration, however, this master frame is not sharply defined, effectively impeding investigation and problematisation of the practices in national contexts.

This chapter, the volume’s Introduction, formulates central analytical and practical challenges posed by the effort to render the solidarity principle in concrete regulations, policies and legal outcomes, that is in “inscriptions of solidarity” in the terminology adopted here. Actors and institutions have often relied on the solidarity principle in their response to new challenges but that reliance poses as many new questions as it answers. Some of these questions are related to the fact that invocations of the solidarity principle have thus far largely failed to effectively reverse the tendency toward growing inequality. The chapter identifies not only positive elements of solidarity’s “inscriptions” but also challenges, especially those that involve enforceability and that partly reflect the frequent use of soft-law instruments in renderings of the solidarity principle. The chapter also explores the interactions – in application – between the principles of solidarity and equality, underscoring the usefulness of efforts to build synergies between those two legal framings or “labels” for initiatives designed to protect vulnerable sectors of the population, constructing an inclusive solidarity. In practice, actors have faced choices about how to frame policies that address crucial social needs.

The law of transnational counter-terrorism comes in various forms, encompassing hard-law instruments like Security Council resolutions, regulatory instruments like good practices or guidance, and managerial instruments like the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. Law is a critical instrument in the post-9/11 approach to developing, reorienting, and globalising a particular orientation towards counter-terrorism. This chapter outlines the dynamics of transnational counter-terrorism law, considering the Security Council’s ascendant position as a lawmaker in this field, the ways in which the regulatory activities of informal institutions are ‘hardened’ through Security Council engagement (thus identifying them as pseudo law-making entities), and how the approach adopted in the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy reinforces these practices. The chapter shows how, through the variety of its forms and addressees, the law of transnational counter-terrorism transports the logics of transnational counter-terrorism into everyday practices of administration, criminal justice, surveillance, all the while marginalising rights.

In recent decades the contribution of collective labor law as a core element of social democracy has been questioned. The existing institutional pathways that deepen democracy have eroded, for labor organizations and the workers represented by them. Unions and workers have reoriented their strategies in order to recover spaces of participation and influence – deeply shaping democratic outcomes through new types of mobilization. The case of platform workers’ mobilization is an emblematic example of local strategies in the face of global problems. New types of mobilization by new actors have reaffirmed labor’s ability to foster democracy’s depth despite the erosion of older institutional channels supportive of that same end.

It is shown that the form of an institution, its legal character, and membership do not determine procedural density.

The finding that the procedural density regarding an activity is zero is very prevalent in the sample. The reasons for this usually lie in low state interest, which is demonstrated via case studies of the European Advertising Standards Alliance and the Proliferation Security Initiative.

During coding, there were certain procedural steps which occurred more frequently than others but no distinct patterns of combinations of procedural steps. This leads me to assume that procedure as a design element is valued for its variety and flexibility.

Whether an activity is hard or soft law or somewhere in between greatly determines state interest in procedural justice. This is further explored via a case study of the Human Development Index.

Like the legal character, the exact characteristics of an administrative activity affect procedural density. This is illustrated using the different branches of the International Telecommunications Union and their procedure.

Of the different kinds of procedural steps, review is by far the least prevalent because it strongly affects state interests and often juxtaposes them with individual rights and interests. This is illustrated with comparative case studies of the Interpol Commission for the Control of Files and the ICANN Independent Review Procedure.

Procedural justice in the shape of procedural steps is a more flexible design tool than an institution's different organs. All things being equal, it is therefore preferred. This is demonstrated by the decentralized compliance monitoring mechanism used by the International Electrotechnical Commission.

The main findings from the empirical research are summarized.

The chapter intends to shed some light on the contribution of Jessup’s ordering idea of transnational law to the conceptualization of an international normative order that is at present increasingly shaped by processes of informal law-making. The first part describes the more recent emergence of different areas of “transnational (…) law” as an important strand in the scholarly discussions on the concept of transnational law. Based on the findings made in this section, the subsequent second part will be devoted to the question whether this trend and its underlying conceptual approach can rightly be regarded as a notable legacy of Jessup’s work. Finally, the third and main section of this contribution will be devoted to an assessment whether this terminological and conceptual trend to theorize the softification of the international normative order on the basis of emerging areas of “transnational (…) law” – first and foremost perceived to be characterized by an increasing blurring of the boundaries between hard law and non-binding steering instruments – can legitimately be regarded as, first, an approach adequately reflecting the normative realities in the present international system, and, second, as a desirable guiding idea for the future evolution of transboundary steering regimes.