This chapter is organized under two main sections. The first discusses how the content requirements of HRIAs are conflated with the ethical requirements of the assessment itself. This, narrow and inadequate species of HRIA ethics is quite different from the extensive body of legal ethics. The second section provides a case study of a World Bank-related impact assessment, which gives rise to legal and non-legal ethical issues and which is meant to demonstrate that the absence of concrete human rights-centred ethical guidelines in HRIAs can, even with the best of intentions, lead to outcomes that effectively violate fundamental rights.

This chapter examines the emergence of a treaty regime at the UN on business and human rights. It examines the key provisions of the Zero Draft as well as the amendments addressed by the draft presented in August 2020. This is a welcome development and it is clear that the focus of the emerging treaty is not so much on the corporations themselves but on the necessary positive measures required of states in this field

MNCs have a central role, responsibility, and opportunity to foment change globally in fulfilling the rights of persons with disabilities. In addition to improving theiremployment practices, MNCs can leverage their economic power to fulfil other aspects of the human rights of persons with disabilities within their purview by: making physical and virtual environments accessible; ensuring that vendors, distributors and supply chains require equal employment opportunity for workers with a disability, produce accessible products and services, and take affirmative actions to employ and advance in employment workers with a disability; acknowledging the existence and value of customers with disabilities and their households and friends; marketing to such individuals; developing data accumulation and accountability instruments, including human rights impact assessments (HRIAs); and creating a general culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion of differences that includes disability. Acting in this manner would bolster rarely helpful corporate social responsibility (CSR) and diversity schemes, and position the business sector to become human rights change agents.

The duties that principals and agents owe each other are typically coterminous with the agency relationship itself. But sometimes temporal lines of clean demarcation do less work. The Chapter identifies situations in which an agent may owe duties—including fiduciary duties—to the principal prior to the formal start of their relationship, including any enforceable contract between the parties. Likewise, not all duties that agents and principals owe each other end with the relationship. The Chapter explores the rationales for duties at the temporal peripheries for an agency relationship and the extent to which they are derived from doctrines distinct from agency law. Issues in some contexts are amenable to resolution through bright-line determinations; others require nuanced and fact-specific inquiry.These structural consequences of agency require tempering either the claims to generality or the content of some theoretical accounts of fiduciary relationships more broadly, particularly those stressing the cognitive dimensions of agents’ loyalty and demanding robust commitment from the agent.

This chapter discusses the gaps in the conceptual foundations of responsible supply chain management. It tends to be explained under various corporate social responsibility (CSR) theories that do not account for the territorial and ‘self-interested’ behaviours that exist inside large companies. We’ll then discuss how firms reconcile core business drivers like cost competitiveness versus normative goals like protecting human rights. Finally, the chapter addresses the ongoing tensions around managing supply chains in host countries where corruption is endemic and institutional capacity is weak and fragmented due to a confluence of political, economic and social factors.

This chapter chronicles an unnoticed aspect of the intellectual history of the “contractarian” paradigm, the descriptive claim that firms are best characterized as nexus of contracts. Although the paradigm’s rise in the 1980s in the corporate world is well known, little has been said about its success in rewriting both theory and doctrine in charitable and not-for-profit law. The contract paradigm has reshaped the questions that not-for-profit scholarship attempts to answers, and it is tightly linked to developments in not-for-profit doctrine and practice. Key examples include the growth of donor standing—the notion that not-for-profits have a fiduciary duty to their donors, and that donors may bring suit for breaches—and the growing obsession with “donor intent” throughout the not-for-profit sphere. I contrast contractarianism with an institutionalist “public trust” conception of charities, which was the prevailing intellectual paradigm for most of the 20th century.

In 2006, the Japanese law of nonprofits underwent a major reform. Notably, the reform involved a shift in the governance mechanism from external governmental oversight to a structure that emphasizes internal fiduciary governance. As the Japanese law in this area has historically been marked by various strands of fiduciary rules derived from different sources, the event presents a valuable case study on how the shift to a fiduciary governance approach can impact the operation of those entities that are subject to the reform. This chapter will begin with a historical account of the evolution of Japanese nonprofit law that involves complex interactions among the indigenous nonprofit tradition, the civil law influence, American fiduciary principles, and the English-style charity commission. After discussing the major components of the 2006 reform against the backdrop of major events that created the reform momentum, this chapter will use available empirical evidence to critically examine the reform’s achievements and consider any remaining issues that pose ongoing challenges.

The regulation of mutual funds in the United States arguably contains the world’s most extensive system of fiduciary protection, buttressed by elaborate liability rules and a host of procedural protections and mandatory disclosure requirements designed to facilitate investor protection and choice. The intensity of this regulatory structure is a subject of perennial debate, as officials and analysts attempt to balance the cost of compliance and oversight against benefits to investors. Government officials have made numerous accommodations to ameliorate the system’s costs and facilitate industry innovations. But, the burdens of this enhanced system of fiduciary protections for mutual funds remain significant and have encouraged industry participants to evade these legal requirements in a number of ways, such as the creation of alternative vehicles for collective investments and the imbedding of regulated mutual funds into other legal structures that escape the full application of the enhanced system of fiduciary protections for mutual funds. This chapter suggests areas where aspects of mutual fund regulation might appropriately be extended to functionally similar investment vehicles.

This chapter examines two modalities of equitable intervention in corporate governance in cases of shareholder conflict. The first involves the extension of fiduciary duties to controlling shareholders, and the second judicial review on the grounds of oppression. Both forms of intervention are intended to be responsive to pathologies inherent in majoritarian governance in organizations featuring enfranchised members. Notwithstanding long-settled authority in Delaware and other American states for the proposition that controlling shareholders are fiduciaries of minority shareholders, I argue that fiduciary regulation is an inapt modality of equitable intervention given the nature of the problems generated by majority rule in corporations. By comparison, the oppression remedy—favored in commonwealth jurisdictions—enables more apt and effective tailored responses to these problems. The choice between these modalities of intervention implicates a choice between equity’s supplemental contributions to first-order law and its corrective, second-order intervention in first-order law. The chapter concludes with some general reflections on the place of equity in contemporary law.

This chapter describes the moral and psychological ‘dilemmas’ of politicians, legal practitioners (like WTO lawyers, investment arbitrators) and businesses, driven all too often by self-interested utility maximization rather than by ‘inclusive, public reason’ accepting moral responsibility for reconciling all public and private interests on the basis of mutually agreed ‘principles of justice’ and human rights. It further illustrates these dilemmas by the US Trump administration’s neo-liberal, business-driven assault on UN and WTO law. It argues that power-politics and interest-group-politics underlying both neo-liberal and state-capitalist regulatory approaches undermine protection of human rights in IEL. It further describes the pragmatic ‘judicial common law approaches’ in WTO jurisprudence and investment adjudication, which focus on governmental rights to protect PGs (like public health, indigenous peoples’ rights, public morality, public order) and on agreed ‘constitutional principles of justice’ rather than on human rights. It concludes that Europe’s multilevel constitutionalism has better succeeded in ‘constitutionalizing’ common market law, the European Union’s (EU) external relations law and economic adjudication by protecting civil, political, economic and social rights within a ‘social market economy’ (article 3 of the Treaty on European Union [TEU]) embedded into ‘multilevel democratic constitutionalism’ and multilevel human rights law and adjudication.

Business is an essential part of human society, and the right to livelihood is a fundamental human right. Business can impact human rights, for better or worse. Recognition of this has led to a legal regime focused on preventing business-related human rights violations. The impact of these violations depends partly on a person’s place in society. Several cases may be used to illustrate how business can have differentiated impacts based on gender. For example, while maternity protection has been recognised in international labour law since 1919, a century later both pregnancy and breastfeeding discrimination, and maternity and paternity inequalities continue. The many gender-differentiated impacts of business on human rights require a gender-responsive business and human rights (BHR) framework. This chapter begins by defining key terms and the theoretical underpinnings of a gender-responsive approach to BHR. Next, it outlines international human rights law (IHRL) and policy relevant to gender, business, and human rights. It concludes that the current BHR regime does not provide adequate protection to those suffering gender-based rights violations. Nevertheless, there are ample legal and related texts presently available with which to begin to remedy this problem.

A robust global legal regime holds business firms accountable for engaging in corruption. This chapter explicates that regime. This chapter also puts forth a business case for not engaging in corruption. Corruption imposes real costs on businesses, and degrades the quantity and quality of relationships into which they might enter. The chapter concludes with a discussion of measures that all businesses should take to mitigate the likelihood that persons associated with them will engage in corruption. Before discussing any of these topics, however, this chapter first discusses the definition of corruption and describes the harms corruption inflicts.

This introduction traces aspects of the history of fiduciary duties in business law and scholarship. Despite fiduciary law’s centrality to business law, the chapter describes how the contractarian revolution of the 1980s contributed to the marginalization of fiduciary duties, both in theory and doctrine. However, subsequent developments, both in case law and in scholarship, have questioned some of the core assumptions of the early wave of contractarian theory. The introduction outlines three critiques that scholars have levied against the early contractarians’ view of fiduciary duties, and connects these critiques to the eighteen chapters in the volume. The introduction also provides a roadmap of our contributors’ arguments.

The ongoing convergence of the various corporate governance systems in the world is reflected by the increasingly important institute of the independent director. Even legal systems, like Germany, which require a dualistic board structure and thus have no or less need for independent directors have introduced independent directors. The paper examines the approach taken in Delaware and Germany and compares them. The comparison shows that while the concept of the independent director is the same in both jurisdictions, it has been implemented rather differently. The legal comparison may, thus, provide suggestions for improving the determination of independence of directors.