Walls, Borders, and Bridges: Law and Society in an Inter-Connected World
The international meeting on law and society 2017, jointly sponsored by the Law and Society Association, the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law, and with the participation of the Socio-Legal Studies Association, the Japanese Association of the Sociology of Law, and the Canadian Law and Society Association, and other groups, took place in Mexico City.
The IILJ’s MegaReg project hosted a roundtable on Justice in Trade After TPP: Building a New Normative Agenda for Transnational Economic Ordering:
The Trans-Pacific Partnership was a ‘mega-regional’ ordering project that sought to align national regulation and administrative practices with cross-national market structures that are driven by Global Value Chains and the digital transformation. After TPP’s demise and with China pursuing alternative ordering models, Latin American and other countries are looking for alternative constellations and instruments for economic ordering, and are reassessing the normative foundations of the existing ordering. Technological changes such as the specter of widespread automation and a transformative digital economy are forcing orthodox thinking on the benefits of trade to grapple with implications of massive job losses at least partially accelerated by globalization. The both inter-society and intra-society distributional effects of economic globalization are also a growing concern, potentially exacerbated by uneven institutionalization and legalization of global trade, financial services, and tax regimes. The panel will critically address possible drivers and draw-backs of large scale economic ordering and explore normative theories and standpoints from which past, existing, and future ordering projects and their rules, regulations, and institutions can be assessed. In engaging these themes, the panel probes (and critiques) the human capabilities approach focusing on persons’ freedom and power to author their own life as one normative framework to rethink the institutionalization of economic globalization.
Roundtable participants
Cynthia Estlund, NYU School of Law
Benedict Kingsbury, NYU School of Law
Paul Mertenskoetter, NYU School of Law
Alejandro Rodiles, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México
Alvaro Santos, Georgetown Law Center
Greg Shaffer, University of California Irvine School of Law
Thomas Streinz, NYU School of Law
