LEILA N. SADAT, Washington University School of Law in St. Louis
Email: sadat@wulaw.wustl.edu

The Rwandan genocide remains one of the most horrific atrocities of the Twentieth Century, resulting in the death of an estimated 500-800,000 human beings, massacred over a one hundred day period. In the fourteen years since the genocide, attempts at justice and reconciliation in Rwanda have involved a delicate interplay between national legal systems and the international legal order. This article examines three fora in which Rwandans have been tried for involvement in the genocide: the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Rwandan courts including Gacaca Tribunals, and French attempts to exercise universal jurisdiction. Using Rwanda as a case study, the article illustrates the issues, concerns, and difficulties that arise when multiple jurisdictions assert a right to exercise criminal jurisdiction over the perpetrators of serious atrocity crimes. Beginning with a discussion of the political context, this article considers what the competing narratives and litigation in various fora have meant for the project of international and transnational criminal justice. Cases involving the commission of atrocities pose unique challenges for the international legal order. As the normative structure of international criminal law has arguably been strengthened, political constraints increasingly come to the fore. As illustrated in Rwanda, universal jurisdiction or other bases of jurisdiction may remain necessary vehicles for justice and reconciliation, or, at the very least, they may serve as catalyst for change in Rwanda itself.

GREGORY SHAFFER, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities - School of Law
Email: Shaffer@umn.edu

This paper, for the Oxford Handbook of Business and Government, addresses the mechanisms through which business shapes law. There are two main ways in which business does so. First, business has advantages before the different public institutions that make and apply law, be they legislatures, administrative bureaucracies or courts. Second, business creates its own private legal systems, including what is traditionally referred to as lex mercatoria (or private merchant law), and private institutions to enforce it (such as arbitral bodies). These two sources of law, publicly-made and privately-made law, interact dynamically. The reciprocal interaction of public and private legal systems constitutes the legal field in which economic activity takes place.

Part I of the paper addresses business' role in shaping law through public institutions. Part II addresses business' creation of private legal rules and institutions. Part III examines how public and private legal systems interact, and, in particular, how private business-made law and business practice affect publicly-made law over time. Although Parts I-III focus on the relationship of law and business in the United States, the chapter's aim is to provide a general framework for analysis which builds from existing theoretical and empirical work in discrete areas. Part IV addresses the interaction of business and law in comparative and global context. It shows how, on the one hand, much of international business law has developed in response to business demands and practices, in the process affecting national law. On the other hand, it explains why national law and legal practice nonetheless retain significant variation in reflection of local interests, institutional structures, and business and legal cultures.

MICHAEL BARAM, Boston University School of Law
Email: mbaram@bu.edu

Multinational corporations are rapidly introducing hazardous technological activities into less-developed nations. There is considerable evidence that this feature of global commerce poses risks to health, safety and natural resources, and most immediately endangers the workers involved. The less-developed nations hosting these activities are vulnerable to exploitation of their human resources because they lack the safeguards, expertise, and public pressures that prevent harms to workers in developed nations. This paper presents an evaluation of approaches taken by international and industrial organizations to address workplace hazards by soft law, hard law, codes of conduct, and voluntary self-regulation. Finding that these approaches have repeatedly failed, a new approach is presented for the purpose of assuring that the transfer of technology will be accompanied by the transference of practices for using it safely. The key features of this approach are then considered: defining a standard of care which aims to provide equivalent treatment of worker health and safety across all nations, irrespective of their level of development, and establishing contractual relationships between multinational companies and host countries as a feasible means of implementing the standard and achieving equivalent treatment.

ROBERT LECKEY, McGill University - Faculty of Law
Email: robert.leckey@mcgill.ca

The paper argues for the use of the metaphor of translation of legal concepts in comparative law by exploring recent reforms to the law of assisted reproduction by the legislature of Quebec. It argues that lawmakers and comparative lawyers may learn from the cautions advanced for literary and legal translators by the translation literature. It argues that the Quebec instance of legislated changes in order to facilitate assisted procreation by lesbian couples shows an excessive literalism in the translation of rules applicable to "natural" procreation to assisted procreation. The legislature might constructively have looked to other parts of the existing private law, as well as to sociological accounts of intentional lesbian reproduction. Translation-as-metaphor also speaks fruitfully to comparatists: it may alert them to the losses of functionalist comparison. Specifically, the treatment of legal rules as "solutions" to a common problem elides distinctive institutional, rhetorical, and discursive differences.

SHAINA KOVALSKY, affiliation not provided to SSRN
Email: kovalsky@buffalo.edu

Wandering through Kafka's The Trial by way of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, this paper shows how The Trial's literary modernism lines up all-too-neatly with Foucault's idea of the panoptic state. The paper then goes on to argue that the disorienting paranoia felt by Kafka's protagonist, a disorientation not unlike that of other modernist works like Picasso's cubist paintings or Eliot's Waste Land, resembles the way any litigant dragged into a legal proceeding might feel. Frightened and more or less alone, Kafka's protagonist has no idea how to defend himself and so his defense appears impossible. In literary modernism, however, a fourth dimension outside perspective is available, so that a museum goer can recognize Picasso's cubist women or cities for what they are. This perspective is what a good lawyer ought to provide, using his or her expertise to help a client navigate what might otherwise feel like a nightmarishly jumbled cityscape.