This course provides students with an introduction to the field of Business and Human Rights. Business and Human Rights raises core questions about the relationship between corporate power, human rights, and the effectiveness of international law in regulating relationships of economic disparity and responding to inequality. Understanding the field’s development requires further understanding and unpacking how traditional distinctions between bodies of law and regulation (public/private; national/international; civil/common) and traditional absences in debates about law (race/class/gender/sexuality/age/ability) are utilized to safeguard powerful interests, and how these distinctions can yet be navigated to bring about change. The course combines an interdisciplinary, critical, intersectional approach to business and to human rights with an in-depth legal analysis of the institutional mechanisms and strategies employed to prevent and remedy corporate human rights abuse.
The course also includes a clinical component. Students are asked to take positions in relation to a problem of international concern implicating states, NGOs, transnational corporations and investors and work together in groups to explain their response. This component will provide students with an opportunity to explore the efficacy of law’s response to contemporary human rights abuses implicating corporations and their global value chains, and to re-think the strategies used by actors working in the field in order to do so.
