CHAINLAW: Responsive Law for Global Value Chains

Doctrine, documents, data - this is the trinity which Anna Beckers will analyse in her project CHAINLAW. The project will lay the foundation for developing a regulatory framework in response to the socio-economic institutions that make up global value chains. Her holistic approach will consider the role of trading practices, contract terms, and the involved networks of auditors and certifiers, as well as transnational legal structures and interventions from states. From the Rana Plaza factory building in Bangladesh collapsing and killing more than a thousand people to the climate crisis, from shortages of medical supplies and toilet paper during the pandemic to a container ship run aground in the Suez Canal becoming a nigh-literal spanner in the works of the global economy. And all the way back to Bangladesh, where a humanitarian crisis broke out when Western fashion brands cancelled their orders en masse during the COVID pandemic. Everything is connected by global supply chains. "For a long time, we have seen neither the disastrous consequences nor the fragilities of this system - because, well, things were just running along nicely." Yet, when in recent years disruptions were mounting, legal scholar Anna Beckers began to think more about the complexity of interconnected global value chains consisting of thousands of suppliers and sub-suppliers and how the law is, to some extent, based on too simplistic a view.