The Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) is now being applied extensively both by international arbitral tribunals and by domestic courts of its more than 70 Member States. But do they also apply it in the same manner? Although Article 7 of the CISG underscores "the need to promote uniformity in its application," it gives little guidance as to how to achieve this goal. Each judge and arbitrator is influenced by the legal methodology of his home jurisdiction. Therefore it is somewhat of a paradox that while the number of Member States is constantly increasing, so too is the threat of variation in application. In this book, the most important issues of the CISG's methodology are analyzed by leading experts from five continents. Some contributors provide a thorough analysis of the central topics of interpretation while others enter almost uncharted territories.

This monograph considers the ramifications of the legal regime that governs transborder capital flows. This regime consists principally of a network of some 3,000 investment treaties, as well as a growing body of arbitral decisions. Professor Alvarez contends that the contemporary international investment regime should no longer be described as a species of territorial “empire” imposed by rich capital exporters on capital importers. He examines the evolution of investment treaties and investor-State jurisprudence constante and identifies the connections between these and general trends within public international law, including the increased resort to treaties (“treatification”), growing risks to the law’s consistency (“fragmentation”), and the proliferation of forms of international adjudication (“judicialization”). Professor Alvarez also considers whether the regime’s efforts to “balance” the needs of non-State investors and sovereigns ought to be characterized as “global administrative law”, as a form of “constitutionalization”, or as an increasingly human-rights-centred enterprise.

This second volume examines laws relating to the civil liabilities of corporations and states in connection with torts or other breaches of international law and human rights law. It illustrates how particular legal principles or rules can be applied or developed to promote corporate accountability, with legal duties that arise under tort law or statutory law. Businesses operate within particular legal regulatory regimes and also within the framework of obligations imposed in tort law. Such laws aim to shape or constrain behaviour for the protection of others in society. There are also environmental protection laws which aim to prevent the release of noxious or hazardous substances, and occupational health and safety laws for the protection of employees. The law of negligence in tort imposes general obligations on persons to take reasonable care to prevent harm to others in circumstances where there is a duty of care. Companies, as legal persons, are required to comply with such legal obligations. The book looks at the role of courts in upholding human rights obligations and providing a forum to resolve corporate human rights abuses issues. If the state does not regulate a specific issue of corporate human rights violations, then the court will address any lacuna in the domestic law by having recourse to (I) rules of international law; (II) general principles of international human rights law; (III) general principles of human rights law common to the major legal systems of the world; (IV) general principles of law that is in agreement with the fundamental requirements of rule of law, and the protection of human dignity and justice; and (V) the general principle of a duty of care (tort of negligence). The book will help lawyers, scholars, and students to see how corporate human rights violations can involve multiple legal principles.

This book develops an analysis of the historical, political and legal contexts behind current demands by NGOs and the United Nations Human Rights Council to hold corporations accountable for their human rights violations. Based on an analysis of the range of mechanisms of accountability that currently exist, it argues that that those demands are a response to the failure of neo-liberal policies that have dominated the practice of politics and law since the emergence of this debate in its current form in the 1970s. Offering a new approach to understanding how struggles for hegemony are refracted through a range of legal challenges to corporate human rights violations, the book offers a fresh perspective for understanding how those struggles are played out in the global sphere. In order to analyse the prospects for using human rights law to challenge the right of corporations to author human rights violations, the book explores the development of a range of political initiatives in the UN, the uses of tort law in domestic courts, and the uses of human rights law at the European Court of Human Rights and at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in how international institutions and NGOs are both shaping and being shaped by global struggles against corporate power.

Sustainable development has garnered the attention of the global community when United Nations created Brundtland Commission in 1983 to suggest various ways to save the human environment and natural resources and promote economic and social development. Sustainable development is a way of organizing that an organization can function in the long term. United Nation’s sustainable development goals provide a framework to translate these into solutions through responsible business and investment by incorporating the ten Principles of the UN Global Compact into strategies, policies and procedures, and establishing a culture of integrity which are expected to bring out transformative change and create enabling environment for doing business globally. Thus, corporate sustainability, to a large extent, would depend on the capability of the firm to function over a long period with sustainable relationships with the stakeholders. The Handbook of Sustainable Development: Strategies for Organizational Sustainability provides guiding principles and diagnostic tools for transformation, generates knowledge about sustainable organizational designs, co-creating value with multiple stakeholders, managing diversity responsibly, ecopreneurship with entrepreneurial bricolage, sustainable business model, developing positive synergy, sustainability reporting and organizational transformation for sustainability which are pivotal issues to be addressed in management education and corporate world.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), founded in 1998, is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation established to ensure a stable and secure global Internet. As the custodian of the Domain Name System (DNS), one of its key responsibilities is the introduction and promotion of competition in Internet-related markets, an aim which ICANN has tried to achieve through the delegation of generic top-level domains (gTLDs). This book investigates how successful ICANN has been in achieving this goal. Over the years, ICANN has been required to decide on a substantial number of complaints from applicants for gTLDs related to capture, arbitrariness, discrimination, and unwarranted restriction of competition. This book is the first detailed study of complaints related to ICANN decisions that have been brought using ICANN's Independent Review Process (IRP). The authors - preeminent expert practitioners in international litigation and arbitration related to Internet governance - take a close look at how ICANN has handled the major issues raised and how ICANN has shaped its own accountability mechanisms. The book also weighs the influence of external accountability on ICANN’s decision-making process and considers the implications of third-party decisions (such as IRP decisions) for the ongoing development of the Internet. This authoritative analysis covers: • the regulatory framework governing ICANN and the introduction of new gTLDs in a historic perspective; • ICANN’s accountability framework; • all the IRP cases that have been decided to date, with an in-depth analysis of those cases that have become reference decisions in the latest application round; and • the 2016 amendments to ICANN’s articles of incorporation and bylaws, concentrating on the problems that remain unresolved. This work is a welcome addition to the debate on how to address the shortcomings in ICANN’s accountability in the interests of the global Internet community. The authors make concrete proposals and recommendations, suggesting changes to ICANN’s regulatory framework in the light of the lessons learned and with a view to preventing similar problems arising in a next round of gTLD applications. This book has the potential to become the Green Book for fundamental changes to ICANN’s accountability framework.