Global value chains (GVCs) are a manifestation of the contemporary global political economy. Viewing them solely as economic constructs, however, obscures the role that law and the wider regulatory environment play in their development and facilitation. The issue of modern slavery within GVCs has been the subject of careful scrutiny from a variety of legal sub-disciplines, including labour, welfare, and immigration law. In this chapter, I examine the role of company law, and particularly the fiduciary duty of directors to act in the interests of the company, in creating conditions under which modern slavery flourishes in GVCs. I suggest that the ideology of shareholder primacy that helps shape board decision-making is flawed both normatively and as a matter of legal doctrine. The central argument advanced is that shareholders’ interests are typically treated as a proxy for a company's interests due to the ambiguity in defining what it means to act in the interests of the company as a legal construct. Yet this focus on prioritizing the interests of shareholders can motivate lead companies’ directors to make decisions that deliver investor returns at the expense of fundamental labour rights and human dignity. The chapter concludes by exploring the potential of incorporating principles of proportionality into board decision-making. It is suggested that this approach can enhance directors’ knowledge and awareness of balancing competing interests, thereby avoiding the most egregious abuses of corporate power in the pursuit of profit.

Introduction

Writing in 2016, the IGLP Law and Global Production Working Group (the IGLP Working Group) observed that residing ‘at the heart of the GVC phenomenon’, law serves as ‘the vehicle through which value is generated, captured, and distributed within and between organizational and jurisdictional domains, and diverse and geographically disparate business operations are coordinated and governed’ (IGLP, 2016: 61). Law and the wider regulatory environment, comprising a complex mix of national, transnational, hard law, and soft law norms, are concerned with GVCs in numerous ways that influence the organization of GVCs. Company law is typically considered to be implicated in GVCs insofar as it shapes the structuring of activities within a chain and the liability (or lack thereof) of investors.

This chapter critically examines how international lawyers have conceptualized the structural relationship between organizations and their members. First, it argues that popular accounts behind the notion that international organizations enjoy a personality that is opposable to non-members rest on problematic, and ultimately unproven, assumption. Next, the chapter explores the idea of volonté distincte. This is the notion that international organizations must exhibit a will of their own before they can be thought of as distinct from their members. The chapter zeroes in on the discipline’s most commonly employed test in this respect, namely checking the capacity of an organization to adopt decisions without the consent of all of its members. It argues that, on closer inspection, this test turns out to be incoherent and cannot serve the purpose it was devised for.

This chapter zeroes in on the relationship between international organizations and customary international law. First, it explains why and to what extent international organizations can contribute with their practice to the formation of customary international law. This chapter argues that the practice of all the organs of an international organization should count towards the formation of new customary norms, with the caveat that this practice should not be weighed separately in terms of its representativeness. Next, this chapter revisits the problem of the extent to which customary international law applies to international organizations. It argues that in principle these institutions are bound to the same extent by custom as states are, with the caveat that they will often derive different rights and obligations from it, given their varied factual circumstances. The chapter then explains how this would apply in practice by looking at human rights and immunities in relation to international organizations.

After underlining the importance and currency of the topic of leadership, the introduction of the volume sets out to explain the content and merits of the present volume. The chapters of the volume make significant contributions to the following topics: (a) the vocabulary of ancient leadership: the authors study terms and concepts related to leadership in several ancient civilisations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iran, Israel, China, Greece, Rome, and the Late Roman Empire), providing clarifications as to their different nuances; (b) the diverse forms of leadership: the essays of the volume deal with good and bad leaders, intellectual and political leaders, imperial and local, thus highlighting the complexity of the phenomenon of leadership in antiquity; (c) theoretical reflections on leadership: the analysis proposed enables readers to trace elements of leadership theory in ancient civilisations. The merits of this investigation consist in encouraging a comparative reflection on ancient civilisations and in triggering also a critical reflection on modern leadership issues.

Throughout the eighteenth century, hundreds of borough officers – mayors, aldermen, burgesses – were prosecuted in the Court of King’s Bench by quo warranto. The purpose of the process was political: to remove these officers from the parliamentary electoral register. The Municipal Offices Act 1711 provided a legislative foundation for the remedy, and secured it against the objection that it was interference with the exclusive right of the House of Commons to determine the eligibility of electors. While the 1711 Act provided litigants with a judicial alternative to petitioning the partisan Committee on Elections, there were abuses. Litigation was sometimes secretly funded by the government, borough officers were intimidated into disclaiming their office by fear of unsupportable costs, and officers who, for years, had innocently assumed that their titles were secure, were ejected for concealed historic defects. An effort to rebalance the process in favour of the interests of borough officers was made by Charles James Fox’s Quo Warranto Act 1792.

Compared to the developments in the Czech lands, where the idea of a Czech nation had become widespread by the late 1800s, the Slovak national awakening was, for a long time, driven by a relatively small group of enthusiasts. In the nineteenth century, the only highbrow artform to be established was literature. The situation changed radically after the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 when the formation of Slovak national culture became an important political goal in the new republic. This chapter explores the roles of Czech musicians, such as Vítězslav Novák, and musicologists, such as Dobroslav Orel, in shaping the concepts of Slovak national music. Additionally, the chapter traces the ways in which these concepts were developed by Slovak composers, such as Ján Levoslav Bella and Eugen Suchoň. Thus, modern musical culture in Slovakia aimed at authenticity while being steeped in the value system of Czech culture.

We define the category of polynomial functors by introducing its morphisms, called dependent lenses or lenses for short, and we show how they model interaction protocols. We introduce several methods for working with these lenses, including visual tools such as corolla forests and polybox pictures. We explain how these lenses represent bidirectional communication between polynomials and describe how they compose. By the end of the chapter, readers will have a comprehensive understanding of how polynomial functors and their morphisms can be used to model complex interactive behaviors.

Progressives who respond to conservative law and economic arguments by rejecting neoclassical economic theory are making a mistake. Neoclassical economics is the only ideology that honors the modern view – associated with the Death of God narrative in Western culture – that there are no longer universal standards of value. To make a case for redistribution of wealth that appeals to the modern view regarding value – a view that progressives themselves hold – progressives must engage with economics. Fortunately, the concept of the gains from trade in neoclassical economics (also known as "surplus" or "economic rent") allows progressives to make a strong case for redistribution of wealth. That is because gains from trade can be redistributed without harming efficiency by varying the prices at which inframarginal units change hands. This insight is called "inframarginalism" to contrast it with the conservative view that the valuations of the marginal buyer and seller pin down price in competitive markets and therefore prevent redistribution of the gains from trade.

In 1921 representatives of the United Kingdom and of the revolutionary Sinn Féin administration in Ireland signed a conditional agreement that subsequently became a treaty establishing the Irish Free State. Lawyers played an important role on each side, none more so than F. E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead), the then UK Cabinet Secretary. Thomas Jones observed caustically that ‘it is notorious that a lawyer cannot draft his own will clearly’. As regards the ambit of a Boundary Commission proposed by Article 12 to redraw the border created in Ireland in 1920 by the United Kingdom, Irish leaders Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins ultimately relied on British goodwill. Birkenhead depended on his knowledge of legal precedent and the Privy Council. This chapter considers the professional status of lawyers on each side and suggests that a certain ambiguity in the agreement enabled a settlement more readily than any insistence on absolute clarity would have.

Chapter 1 retraces the history of the critical reception of Hegel’s social and political thought, from the publication of the Philosophy of Right to the present. The chapter discusses the charges of conservatism raised by Hegel’s first critics, the liberal rehabilitation of his work in the second half of the twentieth century and the communitarian interpretation introduced in British and American debates from the 1980s. Finally, the chapter focuses on the ‘middle ground’ approach favoured today by most Hegelian scholars, based on a compromise between the liberal and the communitarian positions. This kind of interpretation is undoubtedly a step forward from the one-sided approach of many previous readings. However, by favouring the practical dimension of Hegel’s arguments over their logical or metaphysical foundations (an attitude referred to as methodological pragmatism) and by regarding the social dimension of freedom as an adjective rather than a substantive component of his position (an attitude referred to as structural individualism), this interpretative trend ends up reiterating the liberal framework Hegel seeks to transcend.

This article reconsiders Shakespeare’s treatment of Englishness as far more provisional and divergent than has traditionally been understood. Attending to persistent inter-community conflicts in Merry Wives and Henry V, it presents Shakespearian history as defined as much by the lower and middle classes as by titled noblemen.