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CHAINLAW – Responsive Law for Global Value Chains ERC Starting Grant 2022 Anna Beckers

CHAINLAW aims to develop a novel legal language for Global Value Chains (GVCs). GVCs are the trade structures underlying the production of commodities and the offering of services. While GVCs have been intensively studied in the social sciences, they are largely unknown as legal categories. This lack of understanding becomes highly problematic when the law has to legislate on supply chains or decide cases on supply-chain responsibility.

There is significant evidence that legal intervention into supply chains is intensifying for several policy objectives, such as sustainability and human rights protection (EU Negotiations on a Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence, EU Conflict Minerals Regulation), resilience and security of supply (EU Commission Proposal for a Single Market Emergency Mechanism) or fairness (EU Directive on Unfair Trading Practices in the Food Supply Chain). Against this background, it is pivotal that the law understands GVCs as a regulatory object.

GVCs from a legal perspective
The CHAINLAW project will develop appropriate concepts for the law to understand GVCs as a regulatory object and normatively regulate them through legislation and adjudication. To grasp the phenomena of GVCs from a legal perspective, CHAINLAW adopts three novel research perspectives to create a more comprehensive and holistic understanding of law in GVCs.

Firstly, CHAINLAW employs a novel theoretical lens for GVCs to be portrayed as a socio-economic structure, linked to the three central socio-economic institutions. The law constituting GVCs derives from corporations, networks and contracts.

Secondly, a multi-disciplinary analysis is proposed in CHAINLAW, that treats as the law of GVCs not only doctrine (legislation and case law), but also documents (private regulation), and data (socio-technical supply chain software).

Finally, based on developing this analytical legal understanding of GVCs, CHAINLAW aims to build concrete normative legal proposals for regulatory intervention into GVCs and responsive liability models that serve different policy objectives (resilience, fairness, sustainability).

Five years of research
CHAINLAW is a five-year project,  funded as a European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC StG). The funding of 1,5 million euros allows Anna Beckers to work as a Principal Investigator and to build a team of 2 PhDs and 2 Postdocs that will analyse the various types of legal rules prevalent in GVCs from 2023-2028. CHAINLAW is one of six law projects funded in the ERC Starting Grant Competition 2022 and one of only two with a Dutch Law Faculty as a host institution that was rewarded funding.

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