ERC Starting Grant for Anna Beckers on CHAINLAW

The faculty welcomes the excellent news that our colleague Anna Beckers has been awarded a prestigious ERC Starting Grant for her research project on "CHAINLAW, Responsive Law for Global Value Chains". We would like to congratulate Anna Beckers!   What is the CHAINLAW project about? CHAINLAW will develop a novel legal language for Global Value Chains (GVCs). GVCs are the interconnected trade structures that underlie the production of commodities and offering of services. While GVCs have been intensively theorised in the social sciences, they are largely unknown as legal categories. This is highly problematic when the law is starting to legislate or decide cases about supply-chain responsibility. Objectives of CHAINLAW The CHAINLAW project aims to develop appropriate concepts to allow law to understand GVCs and to normatively regulate them. To grasp the phenomena of GVCs, CHAINLAW (a) employs a novel theoretical lens that allows GVCs to be portrayed as a socio-economic structure being linked to the three central socio-economic institutions of hierarchy, markets and relations, (b) proposes a multi-disciplinary analysis on the law that underlies GVCs that integrates doctrine, documents, and data as three different layers of regulation, and (c) develops concrete normative legal proposals for regulatory intervention into GVCs and responsive liability models. Related to this year's ERC Grant