Corporate Globalization and the Liberal Order: Disembedding and Reembedding Governing Norms

Abstract

Advocacy oriented international human rights lawyers and others informed by them tend to differentiate between two types of norms: moral and legal. From moral norms many then try to derive and drive lex feranda; law as it should be. Social scientists and sociologically minded legal scholars also place great weight on the role of social norms. This chapter explores the relationship between social and legal norms in corporate globalization: legal norms undermining social norms in the early stages of the most recent wave of corporate globalization, but then social norms increasingly constraining corporate practices, turning into soft law, with some becoming hard law.