This comprehensive, current examination of U.S. law as it relates to global climate change begins with a summary of the factual and scientific background of climate change based on governmental statistics and other official sources. Subsequent chapters address the international and national frameworks of climate change law, including the Kyoto Protocol, state programs affected in the absence of a mandatory federal program, issues of disclosure and corporate governance, and the insurance industry. Also covered are the legal aspects of other efforts, including voluntary programs, emissions trading programs, and carbon sequestration.

This book revisits the theory of the sources of international law from the perspective of formalism. It critically analyses the virtues of formalism, construed as a theory of law ascertainment, as a means of distinguishing between law and non-law. The theory of formalism is re-evaluated against the backdrop of the growing acceptance by international legal theorists of the blurring of the lines between law and non-law. At the same time, the book acknowledges that much international normative activity nowadays takes place outside the ambit of traditional international law and that only a limited part of the exercise of public authority at the international level results in the creation of international legal rules. The theory of ascertainment that the book puts forward attempts to dispel some of the illusions of formalism that accompany the traditional sources of international law. It also sheds light on the tendency of scholars, theorists, and advocates to deformalize the identification of international legal rules with a view to expanding international law. The book seeks to revitalize and refresh the formal identification of rules by engaging with some tenets of the postmodern critique of formalism. As a result, the book not only grapples with the practice of law-making at the international level, but it also offers broad theoretical insights on international law, dealing with the main schools of thought in legal theory (positivism, naturalism, legal realism, policy-oriented jurisprudence, and postmodernism). This paperback edition features the author's discussion of this book on the EJIL Talk blog.

Because of its unique nature, the sources of international law are not always easy to identify and interpret. This book provides an ideal introduction to these sources for anyone needing to better understand where international law comes from. As well as looking at treaties and custom, the book will look at more modern and controversial sources.

In today's times, more and more companies pursue global sourcing strategies in some form and to some extent. The most prominent reason for the increased interest in global sourcing is the idea to benefit from factor cost differences between sourcing regions. However, recent research indicates that cross-border sourcing is no panacea to generate cost savings. There are situations in which international sourcing does not lead to the intended price reductions or even causes expensive backsourcing activities. Accordingly, the ambiguous image of global sourcing is the point of departure for the dissertation at hand. Thus, the main purpose of this thesis is to explore how global sourcing can contribute to a firm’s purchasing performance. The results indicate that the accumulation of social capital between the buying organisation and its international suppliers can increase the sourcing success. However, given the limited amount of resources for those intimate buyer-supplier relationships, close partnerships cannot be maintained with all suppliers. Consequently, the research at hand points in the direction that global sourcing can be a means to increase the intensity of competition in supply markets, facilitating the pursuit of more adversarial relationships.

Working conditions impact our health, the amount of time we can spend with family, our options during momentous life events, and whether we keep or lose a job when the unexpected occurs. The global community has accepted the argument that any country that guarantees decent working conditions will suffer higher unemployment and be less competitive. This book shatters this view by presenting the first ever global analysis of the relationship between labor conditions, national competitiveness, and unemployment rates in 90 countries.

This volume provides a critical roadmap through the major historical sources of legal semiotics as we know them today. The history of legal semiotics, now at least a century old, has never been written (a non-event itself pregnant with semiotic possibility). As a consequence, its sources are seldom clearly exposed and, as word, object and meaning change, are sometimes lost. They reach from an English translation of the 1916 inaugural lecture of the first Chair in Legal Significs at the Amsterdam University, via mid 20th century studies on “property” or “contract,” to equally fascinating essays on contemporary semiotic problems produced by former students of the Roberta Kevelson Semiotics Roundtable Seminar at Penn State University 2012 and 2013. Together, the materials in this book weave the fabric of semiotics and significs, two names for the unfolding of semiotics in law and legal discourse at least until the second half of the 20th century, and both of which covered a lawyer’s focus on sign and meaning in law. The latter is embedded within the cultural imperatives of the civilization that gave these terms meaning and made them an effective tool for the dissection of law, its reconstitution as an instrument to be used by the lawyer to advance the interests of her clients, and for judges as a means to restructure language as a narrative of law whose power could bend behavior to its strictures. Legal semiotics has become an indispensible part of the elite lawyer’s toolkit and a fundamental approach to analysis of legal texts. Two previous volumes published in 2011 and 2012 explored the conceptual, methodological and epistemological progress in the field of legal semiotics, the modern forms of semiotics study, and the mechanics of meaning making processes by lawyers. Yet the great lessons of semiotics requires a focus on the origins of the concepts and frameworks that would become contemporary legal semiotics, its origins as an object of the consciousness of meaning making—one whose roots, as lessons for the oracular conversations of law, are expanded in this volume.