Responsive Law for Global Value Chains

CHAINLAW will develop a novel conceptual and normative legal language for Global Value Chains (GVCs). GVCs are the interconnected trade structures that underlie the production of commodities and offering of services. While GVCs have been intensively theorised in the social sciences, they are largely unknown as legal categories. This is highly problematic when the law is starting to legislate or decide cases about supply-chain responsibility.The core aim of CHAINLAW is to provide the concepts necessary for law to be able to develop appropriate and effective legislation for GVCs and appropriate approaches to supply-chain liability. It will do so by a combination of theoretical, doctrinal, empirical, technical, and normative analysis on the law of GVCs. To that end, CHAINLAW is ground-breaking by employing, first, a novel theoretical framework based on institutional theory that that sets up a threefold typology of GVCs allowing their qualifications as part of the company, contracts, and as a network simultaneously. CHAINLAW engages, secondly, in a multi-disciplinary descriptive analysis that traces this institutional understanding within various regulatory layers that govern GVCs that include formal law, private and technological regulation in GVCs. It proposes an analysis of the law on GVCs that integrates (i) legal doctrinal analysis of company and contract law and the legal debate on networks, (ii) socio-legal research on private regulatory documents that are set up by companies, contracting parties and within the GVC network, and (iii) socio-technical analysis of supply-chain technologies, as used by companies, commercial parties, and in networked processes. Third, CHAINLAW uses these insights to develop a strategy for how the law can responsively govern GVCs, in private law including liability and public law intervention. Such responsive law needs to integrate the different institutional dimensions of GVCs and address the various regulatory layers in GVCs.