Wednesday, February 9, 2022
12:30pm - 1:45pm
Virtual Event

About this Event:

A presentation and discussion of the American Bar Association’s Model Contract Clauses for Human Rights Project.

Presenters: Prof. Sarah Dadush, Rutgers Law School, Olivia Windham Stewart, & David Snyder, American University

Commentator: Prof. Erika George, University of Utah

Sarah Dadush is a Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School. Her scholarship explores innovative legal mechanisms for improving the social and environmental performance of multinational corporations. She established and directs the Law School's Business & Human Rights Law Program and co-leads an ABA Business Law Section Working Group that has developed a comprehensive toolkit for upgrading international supply contracts to better protect workers’ human rights. Before joining the Rutgers faculty, Dadush served as Legal Counsel for the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized agency of the United Nations based in Rome. Prior to that, she was a Fellow at NYU’s Institute for International Law and Justice and an Associate Attorney at the global law firm, Allen & Overy. She received her J.D. and LL.M. in International and Comparative Law from Duke University School of Law in 2004.

Olivia Windham Stewart is an independent business and human rights specialist based in the UK, and a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the Business and Human Rights Law Program at the Center for Corporate Law and Governance, Rutgers Law School. As an independent specialist, Olivia has worked on a range of projects to increase corporate accountability and due diligence across sectors, including an OECD due diligence alignment assessment, a European Citizens’ Initiative for Living Wages, a range of multistakeholder initiatives in the garment and footwear industry and research, training and facilitation projects on labour rights and BHR issues for a number of organisations across sectors. Prior to working independently, Olivia was on the Labour Rights team at Laudes Foundation (formerly C&A Foundation) and at Impactt UK. She has worked extensively in production countries around the world, particularly in South and South East Asia and has been a contributing member of the Principled Purchasing Project to draft model contract clauses to protect human rights in international supply chains since March 2020. Olivia holds a MSc with Distinction from SOAS University, London.

David V. Snyder is professor of law and director of the Business Law Program at the American University Washington College of Law. His work is primarily in contracts and commercial law, including their international and comparative aspects. He has been a professor of law at Tulane and Indiana (Bloomington) and has been a regular visiting professor at the University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas) since 2012.  He has also been a visiting professor at Boston University and William and Mary. He is a graduate of Tulane Law School and Yale College and clerked on the Fifth Circuit.

Erika George is the Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law at the University of Utah's S.J. Quinney College of Law and directs the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. She teaches constitutional law, international human rights law, international environmental law, international business transactions, international trade and seminars on business and human rights, inequality, and corporate citizenship and sustainability. She was the Interim Director of the University's Tanner Center for Human Rights and the University's 2018-2019 Presidential Leadership Fellow. She is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and serves on the board of the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights. She earned her B.A. with honors from the University of Chicago and her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she served as Articles Editor of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. She also holds an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago. She is the author of Incorporating Rights: Strategies to Advance Corporate Accountability (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Tuesday, November 30, 2021
1:00pm - 2:15pm
Virtual Event

Presenter: Robert Bird, University of Connecticut School of Business

Discussant: Gastón de los Reyes, Glasgow Caledonian New York College

A harmful byproduct of the global economy is the proliferation of abuses in global supply chains. Too often lead firms and suppliers do not effectively collaborate. Lead firms require human rights and sustainability standards while also demanding extremely low cost goods and fast production deadlines. Suppliers faced with the impossible choice of financial survival or compliance with ethical standards, attempt to evade lead firm demands. The result is an illusion of governance that prioritizes investigations over actual changes and perpetuates “slow violence” against local environments and vulnerable populations.

To respond to this problem, this manuscript proposes a new paradigm I call ‘contractual deterrence.’ Contractual deterrence leverages a centuries-old theory of criminal deterrence, reinterprets it to incorporate a modern understanding of sanctions and rewards, and applies the theory to the contractual context of the modern global supply chain. Contractual deterrence is based upon three prongs: that enforcement of ethical supply chain standards must be predictably certain, equitably significant, and swiftly implementable. This manuscript explores these prongs and shows how the theory advances sustainability and human rights literatures. This manuscript also argues for a new multistakeholder theory of social responsibility that challenges western-dominated thinking and encourages a joint and equal partnership between lead firm and supplier in order to address pressing problems facing supply chains today.