童之伟：法学基本研究对象与核心范畴再思考——基于宪法视角的研究 [Tong Zhiwei: Rethinking the Basic Research Objects and Core Categories of Law——Research From a Constitutional perspective]

 

 Tong Zhiwei [童之伟] is today one of the most distinguished scholars of Chinese constitutional law. Based for many years at East China University of Political Science and Law, he has taught in a number of universities and has been prominent, as well as courageous, in his scholarship and engagement with his political community, and with colleagues worldwide.  Over the course of the years I have translated and shared many of his short essays posted online (see here).

Professor Tong has recently produced a quite interesting and important essay,   法学基本研究对象与核心范畴再思考——基于宪法视角的研究 [Tong Zhiwei: Rethinking the Basic Research Objects and Core Categories of Law——Research From a Constitutional perspective], which appeared online in Aisiaxiang  on 26 September 2022. The abstract nicely frames its object--the application of principles of socialist modernization to the reinvigoration of the framework within which Chinese constitutional jurisprudence might be better aligned with the times and the realities of this "New Era" :

[内容摘要]现代汉语法学的核心话语形成于20世纪前期，一百多年来并无明显变化。基本研究对象、核心范畴设定与当代中国法律实践错位，是当今法学基础性研究要解决的首要课题。汉语法学应以权为基本研究对象，采用绝对方法形成以法权为核心的基本范畴体系。汉语法学基础理论应通过重置核心话语来获取现代性、本土性和对当代法律实践的适应性。[[Abstract] The core discourse of modern Chinese jurisprudence was formed in the early 20th century, and has not changed significantly for more than a hundred years. The dislocation between basic research objects, core category setting and contemporary Chinese legal practice is the primary topic to be solved in today's basic legal research. Chinese jurisprudence should take rights as the basic research object, and adopt absolute methods to form a basic category system with legal rights as the core. The basic theory of Chinese jurisprudence should acquire modernity, locality and adaptability to contemporary legal practice by resetting the core discourse.]

This rethinking about the way one rationalizes Chinese jurisprudence (in a sense a rationalization of the structures for rationalizing specific fields of knowledge) provides a refreshingly new way to approach the now sometimes ritualized discourse of rights, duties, power, and the like that has had academics and others running around in circles for a century or so. To be sure the performance of circle running has been quite useful for managing orthodoxy, and  preserving, perhaps even moving the field in some direction or other. Yet, as Tong suggests in the case of China it is one that has grown increasingly detached from the reality about which it ostensibly claims a relation.  At the same time, there is much here that suggests that the easy stance of current popular critical movements  (of the so-called left or right camps) in their own discursive circle running around the critique of liberal rights, might neither be as useful or relevant as it might appear. The missing link, though, is ideology, and it comes at no surprise that ideology is itself an instrument of orthodoxy and the demonization of heresy. The discussion of legal transplantation is particularly useful in two respects, The first touches on the effects of transplantation of transplants (in this case the already digested receipt of European jurisprudence filtered through its development in Japan). The second, in the more abstract transplantation of grounding ideology--especially in the discourse that marks the porous borderlands between Marxist-Leninist and liberal democratic  transplants onto Chinese jurisprudence. Lastly, the consideration of a three part basic jurisprudential typology--(1) traditional rights; (2) power and jurisdiction; and (3) residual rights (positive and negative)--provides a rich basis for considering the possibilities of jurisprudential development in China.   

It is my great pleasure, with Professor Tong's assent, to post both the original and a crude English translation. In that context I note that a critical term used through out the text  “权力” , and translated as power, might well be understood in a more subtle and complex sense as incorporating a cluster of related terms in English--including authority, jurisdiction, commission, as well as the extent or scope of each. 

 

Marianne von Blomberg and Haixu Yu, "Shaming the Untrustworthy and Paths to Relief in China’s Social Credit System" (Modern China 17 Feb. 2023)

 

Pix Credit HERE

I am delighted to pass along the news about the publication of a fantastic article--Marianne von Blomberg and Haixu Yu, "Shaming the Untrustworthy and Paths to Relief in China’s Social Credit System" (Modern China 17 Feb. 2023). The authors (both at the University of Cologne) consider the connections between objectives of trust, the modalities of date driven regulatory management of mass behaviors, and the leveraging of social relations. That combination--perhaps aimed at better management, produces incompatibilities with the traditional normative parameters within which  a law based regulatory system is supposed to operate. 

Abstract: China’s social credit system (SCS) formalizes reputational regulation, thereby challenging traditional remedial paths. It adds trust assessments and their dissemination to the regulatory repertoire of Chinese state agencies across all realms. This use of adverse publicity, however, entails the loss of the agency’s control over the scope and intensity of the punishment as the punitive action is realized by information recipients, rather than the agency itself. Traditional legal controls are not fit for shaming. We map how the SCS innovates public regulation by implementing a strategy for regulatory shaming from the central level. In a second step, we discuss its consequences, specifically, how undue damages are remedied. Legal remedies for social credit shaming measures are regularly denied, as their position in the law is unclear. Other existing remedial channels likewise do not consider the particularities of shame sanctions such as irreversibility. Social credit reputational regulation might best be controlled by formulating an agency practice that retains control over the scope of punishment.

This is, of course, not a uniquely Chinese issue, or one especially confined to social credit regimes.  There is a long history of shaming techniques in Western law--from the stocks, to the publication of the names of the customers of prostitutes. Those techniques have tended to avoid the close inspection that a data driven system has generated (but see eg here)--and perhaps that is the reason. The scalability of shaming through the data rich techniques of social credit substantially intensify the effects. The authors' conclusion might well relate to both versions:

The SCS presents a case in which reputational regulation meets a legal system whose structures are not (yet) able to accommodate it. The ways in which these contradictions will be resolved will shed light on the future of the role of law in China. Further research is needed to explore whether the SCS’s reputation information mechanisms will help to realize “Chinese ‘new era’ pan-moralism” (Lin and Trevaskes, 2019: 44), or retract and develop into an extended open government information scheme in line with the current legal framework.

Yet it is also worth noting that misalignment does not necessarily suggest incompatibility.  It can as easily suggest the need for reform and alignment. 

The online text of the paper may be accessed HERE. 

Video and PPT of Lecture, Keren Wang, "Social and Moral Engineering in the Age of Big Data: Personalized 'Pillars of Shame' and the Chinese Social Credit System" Now Available

 

 

 It was my great pleasure to have attended the lecture by my colleague, friend and former student, Keren Wang, now an ACLS Post-Doctoral Fellow at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia USA).  The lecture, "Social and Moral Engineering in the Age of Big Data: Personalized 'Pillars of Shame' and the Chinese Social Credit System" examined one of the most sensitive areas of legal development--the transformation of the modalities and language of law from text to symbolic action, and its enforcement from an administrative task exogenous to the act, to the development of systems of governmentality (the governance of modes of thought in this case) grounded in quantification and nudging strategies that internalize compliance. The specific focus in this case is China and its  pioneering work in this context organized within regimes we have come to label generically Social Credit. 

The lecture video is now available online and may be accessed HERE.  Highly recommended. 

Keren has also permitted me to share the lecture PowerPoint. They follow below. 

 

 

"Chinese State-Owned Companies: Congruence and Dissonance in Outbound Investment"; Presentation at Oxford University China Law Center 16 February 2023

 

 It was my great delight to find myself again at Oxford and with great thanks to Patricia (Tia) Thornton, to present some thoughts on the complicated topic of Chinese state owned enterprises (CSOEs) at the Oxford China Law Center.

These thoughts, organized as "Chinese State-Owned Companies: Congruence and Dissonance in Outbound Investment," explore CSOEs as an advanced instrument of Chinese Marxist markets theory in China's Leninist New Era, with a focus on outbound investment in the Americas and Europe.  Under ordinary circumstances this topic might  present a bauble of passing interest  to China specialists and to students of Marxist-Leninist and comparative systems. Nonetheless, the topic becomes far more interesting when the forms and narratives of Chinese economic theory, projected outward through its CSOEs, begin to have a substantial effect on the theory and practice of trade, of the application of principles of human rights and sustainability in economic activities, and ultimately on the current contest for control of the fundamental principles of inter-collective activity.  

The presentation starts with the "original sin:" the generation long effort to domesticate Chinese Marxist-Leninist economic collectives within the deep normative expectations of an international trade system founded on principles of markets driven activity and liberal democratic values. Not that any of this was wrong, just that it set up the inevitability of conflict when, after almost a generation China became a producer rather than an consumer of economic and political trade and economic activity norms.  It is necessary then to understand the CSOE within the current expression of Chinese Marxist-Leninism (in its current "New Era". It serves as the organization of state assets whicvh, along with markets, are meant to serve the advancement of the core political and normative objectives of the nation, guided by and under the leadership of the Communist Party of China. It has been the great project of liberal democratic narrative normativity to disabuse the Chinese of this starting notion for the organization of public life. Anf it has been resistance to those efforts that have brought us to the current situation. That situation, operationally, is marked by a deep web of guidance, policy and law, which for the central (leading) CSOEs is managed through organs of the Chinese State Council, but within which the CPC is embedded at every level.  The organization of assets with a purpose also mark the constitution of Chinese Leninist macro economics policy, especially as they touch on risk, human rights and sustainability. That is explored next, in the context f the great divergence between the two systems marked by their approach to risk and the application of prevent-mitigate-and remedy principles. From this emerges Socialist expressions of trader and human-rights/sustainability. With this in hand it is now possible to begin to consider the question: to what extent does that divergence produce operational dissonance when CSOEs operate abroad? The short answer is this: ion the context of operational decision making the differences are largely one of degree, with CSOEs more inclined to consider remedy as a viable strategy, and in managing their own risk will negotiate with local stakeholders. The differences are much larger in the context of initial decisions to invest in projects.  It is here that divergence will have the most profound effect. And in the process the liberal democratic impulse to sanction (ghost) offending investments may meet its greatest challenge within the operational parameters of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (eg here).

The PowerPoint of the presentation follow.  They may also be accessed here. For SOEs, global trade, and the calculus of risk, and rights (human and sustainability based) in economic activity the discussion is just beginning.

Full text of 2023 Joint Statement on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between Islamic Republic of Iran and Peoples Republic of China

 

 The Belt & Road Initiative is proving to be a flexible device fo4r the constitution of an all around  approach to bilateral relations within a rationalized multilateral structure. Much of the more granular expressions of BRI relations tend to find themselves in Memorandum of Understanding atta ched to or developed alongside the BITs or related public  instruments.

A small window on what might be in such MOUs (though in this case designed for public consumption) might be gleaned by the Full text of Joint Statement on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between Islamic Republic of Iran and Peoples Republic of China posted (in English--and thus for  projection outward) on the website of the Iranian Presidency. It was produced at the end of of Xi Jinping's state visit to Iran.  It builds on the 2016 Joint Statement on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and a 2020 effort at a long term cooperation agreement. An American analysis may be considered here. The 2023 Joint Statement follows in full below.  

In his Regular Press Conference 13 February 2023, Wang Wenbin explained:

CCTV: China announced yesterday that Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi will pay a state visit to China. Can you share more about the program of the visit? What’s your expectation for the visit? And how does China view the current China-Iran relations? 

Wang Wenbin: This visit will be President Raisi’s first visit to China after taking office. During the visit, President Xi Jinping will hold talks with President Raisi to jointly provide planning and guidance for the development of bilateral relations, and have an in-depth exchange of views on regional and international issues of shared interest. Premier Li Keqiang and Chairman Li Zhanshu will also meet with President Raisi respectively.

China and Iran enjoy a traditional friendship. Consolidating and developing relations is the strategic choice made by both sides. In recent years, under the guidance of President Xi and President Raisi, China-Iran relations have maintained the momentum of sound growth, featuring stronger political mutual trust, steady progress in practical cooperation in various fields, and sound communication and coordination in international and regional affairs in defense of the principle of non-interference in internal affairs and the common interest of developing countries. China looks forward to working with Iran to take this visit as an opportunity to make greater progress in China-Iran comprehensive strategic partnership, and play a constructive role in enhancing solidarity and cooperation between countries in the Middle East and promoting regional security and stability.

The version circulated (in English) by the Chinese Foreign Ministry may be accessed HERE. 

 

"The ESG Wars": Presentation of the University of Dundee (Scotland)

 

It was my great delight to have been able to deliver remarks to students and faculty at the University of Dundee. The event was organized by the remarkable Claire Methven O'Bien (Dundee Law School, School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law). 

The remarks, entitled "The ESG Wars" considers the context and consequences of the movement toward the insertion of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) risk/impact factors in a variety of contexts around investment, economic activity, and the management of systemic risk. This, in turn, is aligned with movements toward private and public efforts to achieve convergence with human rights, sustainability, and climate change related principles, and to embed these risk/impact parameters through mandatory measures. The result has been the transformation of ESG from risk to impact measures, and its reconstitution as a platform within which producers and consumers of risk and related standards of acceptable decision making within risk parameters, is sketched out.

To that end, the evolution of the character of ESG from an investment risk assessment devices toward more comprehensive systems for the evaluation of project risk, and as a means of implementing risk reduction cultures grounded in the principle of prevention-mitigation-remedy was discussed.  The application of ESG as risk factors bearing on financial decisions making, decisions to engage in specific projects, the use of ESG risk assessment as impact measures guiding decisions abut internal operations and corporate business, and its use in organizing the private law of production chains, is considered. This project of ESG as a risk based form for guiding decision making is weakened by fundamentally imortant challenges. These include issues f definition coherence, variation in methods of assessments, data quality, scope of application, scalability, comparability, and liability consequences.  The effects of growing and robust markets in ESG assessments suggest challenges to the character and utility of ESG modalities as a means of nudging cultures of acceptable business behaviors and forms of decision making.  That, in turn, requires unpacking the great utility of ESG--as a vessel through which ideological battles over the normative structures of economic activity can be undertaken beyond the spotlight of democratic engagement and in the shadows of apparently technical methodological techniques. At the same time, the utility of ESG as a vessel for undertaking this ideologically charged narrative of economic activity (including the role of markets, acceptability of risk taking, the profit principle, and corporate purpose) narrative is undertaken. Here, one encounters a continuation of the underlying normative battles over the meta-narratives of a half generation of soft law measures--the SGDs and the UN Guiding principles for Business and Human Rights among them--and their implications (through the language and modalities built into ESG of risk-response principles) for rationalizing economic activity as social and political instruments.  The remarks ended with a consideration of current (US) efforts to challenge this ideological project.

The PPTs prepared in aid of the remarks follow.  Posting of the recording will be made available when ready. The PPT may be downloaded HERE.

"Rethinking the Scope and Nature of State Liability for Acts of their Commercial Instrumentalities" for Book Launch for "The Regulation of State-controlled enterprises: An Interdisciplinary and Comparative Examination"--UCL 10 February 2023

 

I was delighted to have been part of a book launch, held at University College London, for  new book, Regulation of State-Controlled Enterprises: An Interdisciplinary and Comparative Examination (Springer, 2022), edited by Julien Chaisse, Jędrzej Górski, and Dini Sejko.

This book analyses actual and potential normative (whether legislative or contractual) conflicts and complex transnational disputes related to state-controlled enterprises (SCEs) operations and how they are interwoven with the problem of foreign direct investment. . . The book also aims to analyse the “SCE phenomenon” which includes a wide panoply of entities that have various structures with different degrees of control by states at the central or regional level, and that critically discuss the above-mentioned overlapping legal economic and political systems which can emerge under various shades of shadows casted by governmental umbrellas (i.e., the control can be exercised through ownership, right to appoint the management, and special-voting-rights). (About the Book)

Those participating include: Dr Alessandro Spano, Lecturer in Chinese Law and Co-Director, UCL China Centre (Chair); Prof Leila Choukroune, Professor of International Law and Director of the University of Portsmouth Thematic Area in Democratic Citizenship (Co-Chair);Prof Larry Catá Backer, Professor of Law, Pennsylvania State University; Mr Ji Ma, Research Associate, China, Law and Development Project at Oxford University;Prof Julien Chaisse, Professor of Law, City University of Hong Kong (CityU);Dr Dini Sejko, Research Associate, Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

For my part I spoke briefly to the issue of state liability for acts of their state owned enterprises, especially as they touch on issues of the human rights and sustainability responsibilities of enterprises for their economic activities. It is well known that the great strength of fields of legal academic study, its single minded focus on a very specific slice of human activity (for it is almost invariably centered on the human), also suggest its great weakness, its inattention either to other fields. That binary is very much in evidence in the study of the regulatory relations of enterprises and their owners for the activities that impact human rights or sustainability responsibilities. That strength-weakness binary is intensified when one considers the legal obligations of states for the actions of their enterprises. Here the imperatives of a rights related jurisprudence (one followed single minded by its proponents) bumps up against equally singlemindedly considered imperatives of asset partitioning (in the law of corporations) and sovereign immunity (in public law). 

In this context it is worth considering the extent to which the stability of the relation between human rights and sustainability related duties and responsibilities, the protection of asset partitioning principles in corporate law, and principles of sovereign immunity might now be upended. Several trends appear to contribute to this instability.  The first is the trend toward the governmentalization of the private sector. States increasingly implement policy through disclosure, supervision, approval, and liability systems managed by and through enterprises--supply chain due diligence, forced labor disclosure principles and the like are emblematic. The second is privatization of the state. The state has increasingly sought to project policy, especially beyond its borders, through interventions in the markets, and in some places through the operations of state owned or managed enterprises. That management may be asserted directly through control relationships or constructively through elaborate systems of oversight. The third is the glimmerings of a movement toward the regularization of a system of human rights and sustainability torts that might penetrate through the barriers of legal or corporate personality and autonomy. Together these trends may require a substantial rethinking of the forms and application of sovereign immunity to the state when it acts as effective owner of enterprises. And it might require substantial reconsideration of the impermeability of corporate autonomy in the face of the principles emerging in the constitution of human rights torts. Together they might also suggest that state immunity might reqire substantial diminution when it operates across borders in and through markets.

The PowerPoint in aid of my remarks follow. They may be downloaded here

 

Discourse in Search of its Ideal State of the State--Without (Much) Comment: President Biden's 2023 State of the Union Address

 

 

On 7 February 2023, President Joe Biden gave his 2023 State of the Union Address.  It followed the classic form of such remarks, the way that the General Secretary's Report to the Chinese Communist Party Congress is built  on a repeating form: the power of repetition lies with the reassurance that it provides; reassurance of stability, and of comparability. In the case of the State of the Union Address these repetitive elements are built into the form: a longish exposition of the triumphs of the current administration from the last year, the challenges that remain, an exposition of friends and enemies and plans to deal with them, and then a sometimes detailed blueprint for presidential led action building to a crescendo of hope and elation and inspiration to carry on. 

This year was no different.  

Pix credit here

The most interesting part, discursively at least, was to see now more fully developed a trope that has played well politically in a a divided country--the trope of painting the opposition party as the reactionary 'other.'  Certainly the opposition party (or at least some of its factions) did their bit to open the door to the effectiveness of this formulation, but it has been carefully curated in everything frm a string of Mr. Biden's speeches on the democratic threat to the nation, to the theater designed into the January 6th hearings. There is little doubt that this discursive strategy has been effective--the American masses have long been trained now to think in paralytic terms even with respect to the most mundane things (for example weather reports suggesting millions under threat of this or that, epidemics of this or that social ill and the like). That trope was played quite well in the speech--aided by the theatrics of members of the opposition party that underlined the point, even in its most boorish forms.  Every discursive effort requires its props and the willingness of all to play their roles.  And sometimes parody (Sanders says the choice in the U.S. is 'normal or crazy' in GOP response to Biden). . . . 

Pix Credit here

There was one little curiosity that is worth a mention, if only because it might have been lost in a long text but is emblematic of the shift in the self-reflection of the nation; maybe. That touches on the further development of the notion, briefly set out near the end of the remarks--" We must see each other not as enemies, but as fellow Americans. We are a good people, the only nation in the world built on an idea" may bear watching.  Of course it fits in nicely into the fundamental principle of solidarity in diversity, but it also shifts the discursive focus of sovereignty from the people who may exercise it from time to time, to the institution of government to attain a perfect alignment with the idea of itself. That is both a profoundly detaching and semiotic proposition.  It is semiotic in the sense that it appears to invest ideas with a corporeality and driving force once reserved to popular politics (captured in an address delivered by a different American president in  19th century here). It is detaching because it appears to suggest not just the limits of the exercise of mass autonomy in politics, but rather the curation of that autonomy under an abstract structure likely overseen by those with the power to interpret and apply (to make manifest that idea) in practice.

There is irony here. One might be forgiven for thinking that it is also one that aligns the theoretical foundational thinking of at least some in the American political class with those who advance a similar idea but grounded in the ideals of Marxist-Leninism as it is developing in that great external American 'other'.  A curious convergence, indeed--not as to objective but as to the framework through which each seeks to realize a purpose autonomous of the people over which it applies.  In each case the direct connection between  the sovereign masses and their organs of government are disconnected, and both now serve not each other but the ideal (whatever that ideal is).  And it is for each leader in turn to reshape its articulation to suit the times and sometimes the serendipity of those (masses and administrators) who populate both territory and administrative organs. I suspect that this may not have been what was running through Mr. Biden's mind. . . nor its profound repercussions in the constitution of a discourse of liberal democratic politics, but it is there. And it may now be unavoidable.  And yet it is one in which the ideological positions of factions of both political camps might fit more comfortably than in the traditional "populism" which has now been demonized and marginalized. The nation, it seems, now fights to preserve, or better, attain, the idea of itself. That idea of itself is not dependent on itself--any aggregation of factors can also serve the same purpose of self-actualization--the idea becomes universal and a historical though birthed in a specific time and place and among a peculiar people. It is in that shedding of origins and localization that one serves the ideal. And everything else follows.

Beyond that, the usual vision ("To restore the soul of the nation. To rebuild the backbone of America, the middle class. To unite the country." Biden State f the Union Address, supra)) focused on specific programs aligned with the pursuit not of a more perfect union but perhaps on a perfect one. A little spice was added by the indulgence in the rhetoric of setting up of improbable targets followed by solemn pledges of defense (social security and medicare for example). And, of course, the cultivation of alertness against threats from within and out the nation--against which it is necessary to vest the leader with authority to act, trusting that discursive ability will translate into strategic and operational genius.  None of this is new, or new to this speech type. And for that, there may be some comfort for those who seek assurance of stability in the ritual repetition of speech patterns and respect for traditional forms. We in this Republic may then perhaps rest better assured that, at least for another year, the old forms will be respected, and the traditional tropes, however repurposed and thrust onto the field of politics, will seep into the practices of stability . . . and if we are very lucky, prosperity.

The text of the address follows below.  It may also be accessed HERE. Also available:  Excerpts from President Biden’s State of the Union Address as Prepared for Delivery

Request for Comment: GRI draft Standard for companies with activities in the mining sector

 

 

In a press release, the folks at GRI have announced that their draft Standard for companies with activities in the mining sector is now open for public comment.

The mining sector was prioritized because of its high environmental and social footprint, often concentrated in and around extraction sites. These impacts need to be carefully managed to ensure the sector can deliver the minerals needed for green technologies for the low-carbon transition and the development needs of a growing global population in an equitable and just way.

Although most major extractive companies already publish information on their sustainability performance, the quality of reporting is still considered inadequate. GRI’s draft Standard addresses the most significant impacts of the mining sector, providing a common set of metrics that represents the broad information needs of stakeholders from a global base.

The draft Mining Standard applies to any organization engaged in mining and quarrying activities, including exploration, extraction, primary processing of all types of minerals (except for oil and gas, and coal), as well as support services and supply of specialized products to the sector. Read more about the relevance and application of the standard in our press release.

GRI seeks feedback on clarity and feasibility of reporting standards, the value and robustness of data selected for reporting and its relevance for impacts assessment. Note that  following the GSSB’s Due Process Protocol, all comments received will be considered a matter of public record and made available on the GRI website.

The exposure draft for the Mining Sector Standard is open for public comment from 7 February until 30 April 2023. You can provide feedback using this form.

The Table of Links between the likely material topics for the mining sector and the SDGs (Table 2 pp. 298-287) follows below.

 

Part 1 (The Form and Function of Commentary): Seeking Input on Project--Commentary on the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights

 

Pix Credit here;

 At the invitation of my publisher I have been working on the production of a comprehensive commentary of the United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights.  This is a humbling task. It follows the production of both an official commentary, written by those responsible for the UNGPs themselves, and more recently by a magisterial effort, written in the form of a Talmudic ‘Gemara’ (גמרא), originally a mastery and transmission of existing tradition, to the primary text of its ‘Mishnah’ (מִשְׁנָה), oral traditions reduced to text, undertaken by a collective of some of the most distinguished students of other fields of human rights, business, and its related fields of academic  study ( The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: A Commentary (Barnali Choudhury (ed); Edward Elgar, 2023).  

In this and subsequent posts, will provide a window on that process. The hope s that it might be of interest and more importantly that it might produce some input.

This first part introduces the basic questions: What can one add to these commentaries? And how does one attempt an all around approach to commentary sensitive to the ecologies of context in which such commentary will be received, contested, embraced, or rejected (each of which is a useful object of commentary)? To answer that, it is perhaps useful to start with first principles. These touch on the nature of commentary, its deep embedding in the cultural life of societies all over the globe, and the application of these sensibilities to the task undertaken.