KDEC 9550 - Social Rights in Transnational Perspective

The welfare state and its core labor law and social protection regimes were built through quintessentially national political struggles, in the wake of the Global North’s Industrial Revolution. After defining itself in opposition to individual rights for decades, the northern welfare state was eventually reconceptualized as procuring social rights, as distinct from the bourgeois Enlightenment’s civil and political rights. Meanwhile, many countries of the Global South, having freed themselves from colonial domination and pursued ambitious industrialization policies for decades, also came to explicitly embrace social rights, including worker protections and the rights to (inter alia) housing, health, and education.............................................................................................................

No national social rights project, however, was ever able to operate independently of transnational economic interactions, as is now evident following the rise of globalization, multinational corporations, and “global value chains.” This course will thus propose an in-depth look at the global legal and economic structures that bear on national social rights projects and compound the local challenges these projects face. We will also study attempts to use transnational legal regimes to protect social rights in today’s global economy; we will look at the use of trade law, extraterritorial private and corporate law, transnational collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, and, most promisingly, innovations that blend these regimes in new and creative ways at the hands of mobilized civil society.

There is no prerequisite for this course, and there are no assigned readings for the first class.

Classes will mostly not be lectures but rather directed discussions in which I will try to guide us towards canvassing the content of the readings; I will expect students to participate actively throughout. The last two classes will be devoted to in-class presentations regarding case studies of social rights advocacy, with extensive discussion by the group.

Class participation (25%); short take-home mid-term exam (15%); in-class presentations discussing a case study of social rights advocacy (25%); take-home final exam (35%).