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Managing the Trade-Climate Policy Interface Through Open Plurilateral Agreements: Learning from the EU Deforestation Regulation Experience
Full text linkTrade policies motivated by security or commercial interests are increasingly complemented by trade measures that seek to induce foreign producers to green their production processes. A prominent example is the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). Such unilateral measures are unlikely to be efficient, and at the limit may simply be ineffective. In this paper we use the EUDR experience to make the case for countries seeking to use trade policies to negotiate jointly defined approaches to achieve nontrade goals. We consider the scope for doing so in the framework of trade agreements and through stand-alone, issue-specific open plurilateral agreements (OPAs). We argue OPAs are likely to offer a superior basis for cooperation. Whether countries decide to leverage trade or development institutions multilateral institutions have an important role to play in facilitating negotiation of environmental policies that support local communities while encouraging trade, and in assisting states to implement the resulting agreements
Sovereignty, Sins, and the Reassertion of Primary Taxing Rights by the United States
Full text linkIn this report, Graetz argues that the United States must reassert its primary taxing rights over income long conceded to other countries, especially income from intellectual property created in the United States, and he explains some changes necessary to make that happen
\u27Reciprocal\u27 Tariffs: What\u27s in a Word
No full textOn 13 February 2025, President Trump released a memorandum announcing his intention to impose “reciprocal tariffs” under the Fair and Reciprocal Plan (FRP). The plan does not operate under a reasonable definition of reciprocity, is illegal under World Trade Organisation (WTO) law, would damage both the United States and its trading partners and could trigger reactions that would bring an end to the international trading system as we know it
The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity
No full textOur world is dominated by a handful of tech platforms. They provide great conveniences and entertainment, but also stand as some of the most effective instruments of wealth extraction ever invented, seizing immense amounts of money, data, and attention from all of us. An economy driven by digital platforms and AI influence offers the potential to enrich us, and also threatens to marginalize entire industries, widen the wealth gap, and foster a two-class nation. As technology evolves and our markets adapt, can society cultivate a better life for everyone? Is it possible to balance economic growth and egalitarianism, or are we too far gone?
Tim Wu — the preeminent scholar and former White House official who coined the phrase “net neutrality” — explores the rise of platform power and details the risks and rewards of working within such systems. The Age of Extraction tells the story of an Internet that promised widespread wealth and democracy in the 1990s and 2000s, only to create new economic classes and aid the spread of autocracy instead. Wu frames our current moment with lessons from recent history — from generative AI and predictive social data to the antimonopoly and crypto movements — and envisions a future where technological advances can serve the greatest possible good. Concise and hopeful, The Age of Extraction offers consequential proposals for taking back control in order to achieve a better economic balance and prosperity for all.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1403/thumbnail.jp
A New View of Formal Equality and a Case for Predistribution
No full textA long-held egalitarian view is that formal equality — the absence of formal legal distinctions based on the material resources of individuals — is regressive. If legal rules are the same for the rich and the poor, the rich benefit and the poor suffer. This Essay argues that this view is mistaken. Far from being synonymous with laissez-faire, a commitment to formal equality provides a counterweight to the key neoliberal maxim that regulation of the market economy should focus on efficiency alone. Moreover, a new view of formal equality offered here reveals a key advantage of predistribution over redistribution: Explicit redistribution is formally unequal, while predistribution can be achieved using only formally equal rules
What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions
No full textEven as anti-racism practices seemed to be gaining momentum, the nation shows signs of falling back into long-standing patterns of racial injustice and inequality. Leaders who introduce anti-racist approaches to their organizations often face backlash from white colleagues and skepticism from colleagues of color, leading to paralysis. In What Might Be, Susan Sturm explores how to navigate the contradictions built into our racialized history, relationships, and institutions. She offers strategies and stories for confronting racism within predominantly white institutions, describing how change agents can move beyond talk to build the architecture of full participation.
Sturm argues that although we cannot avoid the contradictions built into efforts to confront racism, we can make them into engines of cross-racial reflection, bridge building, and institutional reimagination, rather than falling into a Groundhog Day-like trap of repeated failures. Drawing on her decades of experience researching and working with institutions to help them become more equitable and inclusive, Sturm identifies three persistent paradoxes inherent in anti-racism work. These are the paradox of racialized power, whereby anti-racism requires white people to lean into and yet step back from exercising power; the paradox of racial salience, which means that effective efforts must explicitly name and address race while also framing their goals in universal terms other than race; and the paradox of racialized institutions, which must drive anti-racism work while simultaneously being the target of it. Sturm shows how people and institutions can cultivate the capacity to straddle these contradictions, enabling those in different racial positions to discover their linked fate and become the catalysts for long-term change.https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/books/1399/thumbnail.jp
Introducing a New Corpus of Definitive M&A Agreements, 2000-2020
No full textContract design and architecture is an important topic within economics, finance, and law. However, attempts to study it are significantly constrained by the limited availability of public, high quality data. In this paper, we introduce a new corpus of 7929 Definitive Merger Agreements submitted to the SEC between 2000 and 2020 involving a transaction in excess of $100 million. Through a combination of machine learning and human evaluation, we associate these agreements with other metadata, such as deal size, industry classification, and advising law firms. In addition, we identify and make available the text of individual clauses contained in these agreements. In a final step, we provide an illustration of how these data can be used to generate novel insights into M&A contract design and drafting practices
Land Banking for Large-scale Land-based Investment: A Responsible Investment Perspective
Full text linkPublic banking of land for private investment appears to have emerged since the 2007–2008 global financial crisis as a common yet under-researched policy mechanism. A snapshot investigation revealed that a number of countries, particularly low- and middle-income countries (including Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, and Tanzania), have attempted or are pursuing land banking policies to encourage large-scale land-based investment (LSLBI). Information about these mechanisms, including their existence and efficacy, is scant. If not done responsibly, land banking for this purpose could have far-reaching implications for local communities and risks perpetuating the same problems associated with LSLBI that decades of study have revealed. This issue paper recommends careful consideration of land banking for LSLBI as a policy mechanism and deeper research to better understand its implications for sustainable development
Law and Historical Materialism
Full text linkSince the financial crisis of 2008, left-leaning legal thought has experienced a renaissance within the American academy. From law and political economy to critical race theory to feminist legal studies to Marxist legal theory, new perspectives have flourished, and marginalized traditions have been revived and revised. These new perspectives and revisionist projects all share an intellectual debt to the critical legal studies (“CLS”) movement of the late 1970s and 1980s. That movement’s critique was focused on functional accounts of law: accounts that understood legal change as primarily responsive to the demands of extralegal social and economic forces. Some of those accounts, such as that of the law and society school, were associated with the political center. Others, most especially historical materialism, hailed from the political left. For CLS and its successors, the failure of historical materialism to account for the indeterminacy of law, the contingency of legal development, and the autonomous causal power of law and legal actors to shape society was — and remains — disqualifying.
This Article argues that CLS erred, and that its successors continue to err, in sidelining historical materialism as a viable framework for left-leaning legal thought. The historical materialist account of law has the resources to make sense of the apparent indeterminacy, contingency, and autonomy of law and legal actors at least as well as CLS and its successors. It can also make better sense of three additional phenomena with which CLS and its successors have struggled: the tendency of legal development to reproduce existing social and economic hierarchies; the relationship between law and capitalism; and the relationship between law and the natural world
The Role of Advisory Opinions in International Law in the Context of the Climate Crisis
Full text linkBetween December 2022 and March 2023, three requests for an advisory opinion were submitted to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR), and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Furthermore, a request for an advisory opinion from the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCtHPR) is being prepared. As such, 2024–2025 marks an unprecedented moment in global climate litigation: as of November 2024, we are on the verge of having four of the world’s most important international and regional courts and tribunals answering crucial legal questions on the (ex ante and ex post facto) responsibility of States for climate change. This edited book includes 13 chapters discussing advisory opinions as instruments of climate governance, voices and participation in advisory opinion proceedings, and the lasting impact of advisory opinions