Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance in India

Corporate Governance

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has had a pivotal status in the debates surrounding corporate law and governance at the turn of the century. Although CSR was ensconced in the idea of voluntarism by which companies and their boards are invited to pay attention to the interests of various constituencies affected by a company’s activities, in some jurisdictions it has also acquired the status of a legal obligation. However, a recent strain of literature has identified that the broader sustainability concerns surrounding corporate governance have focused more on environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG), and away from CSR as traditionally understood.

A New Player in the Treaty Interpretation Game

Public International Law

As lawyers, texts are – to a large extent – our ‘stock in trade.’ And so, like many other lawyers, I have become fascinated by the ability of services such as ChatGPT to use large language models (‘LLMs’) to generate human-like text. Much has been written on how LLMs can pass bar exams and how they might affect various areas of national law. But there’s something of a blind spot when it comes to how LLMs will affect international law, particularly in the realm of treaty interpretation. Yet treaty interpretation, with its complex interplay of language, context, and legal principles, provides a particularly intriguing case study for the potential impact of LLMs.

Illegal Wildlife Trade: The Critical Role of the Banking Sector in Combating Money Laundering

Banking and Finance

During the past two decades or so, the sale of illegally harvested wildlife or derivatives thereof, commonly referred to as illegal wildlife trade (IWT), has developed into a highly profitable organised crime, with the World Economic Forum estimating an annual generation of approximately USD 20 billion in proceeds from wildlife products. The increasing demand for wildlife products such as pelts, ivory, furs, wildlife-based medicines and exotic pets poses major consequences for the international financial system. It also threatens biodiversity, enables corruption and increases public health risks such as the spread of zoonotic diseases which are transmitted from animals to humans. This widespread impact illustrates the seriousness of IWT.

A Cosmo-medial Supplement to Law and Literature

International Law

As law and literature reorients itself to the global South and other understudied localities, the question of what remains of the European legacy in the postcolonial conjuncture becomes all the more pressing. In Planetary Gifts of Law and Literature published in Law & Literature, I attempt to address this by reading Nuruddin Farah’s Gifts (1993), a Somali novel surrounding a young Muslim nurse Duniya’s care for a foundling, alongside Immanuel Kant’s writings on cosmopolitanism, enlightenment, and book publishing. My suggestion is that these key exchanges between Farah’s critique of humanitarian aid in late-1980s Somalia and Kant’s classics reflect the importance of (re)staging dialogues between postcolonial literature and the European legacy as we work towards a planetary discourse of law and literature.

Engagement of Swiss Courts with International Law

International Law, Public Law

Switzerland is usually seen as a country friendly to international law: it is home to many of the world’s international organisations, is active in peace-building around the world, and, not least, acts as depository and is party to a large number of international treaties. However, in recent times, its respect for international law, and for the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), has been called into question. So, what is Switzerland’s relationship with international law? And specifically, what is the role of domestic courts in the application of international law? These are the questions explored in the paper entitled ‘Engagement of Swiss Courts with International Law’ that I co-authored with Prof. Eva Maria Belser in the book ‘The Engagement of Domestic Courts with International Law’, edited by André Nollkaemper, Yuval Shany, Antonios Tzanakopoulos, and Eleni Methymaki, published in May 2024 by Oxford University Press.

A bank’s duty to question payment instructions, aka the Quincecare duty

Banking and Finance, Contract Law

Payment scams are rife. A particularly prevalent form is the authorized push payment (APP) scam. These payments are authorized by a bank customer after falling for a third party’s deceit, which may take many different forms, including fake investment opportunities, impersonation of figures such as bank officers and the police, and diverting an intended payment into the scammer’s account. Because these payments are authorized by the customer, the bank has a valid authority (mandate) to pay and must ordinarily make the payment. Authorized payment scams can be contrasted with unauthorized payments which do not originate from the customer and therefore involve forgery. In such cases, a bank has no authority to pay and at common law will bear the loss, although this is subject to contract terms allocating the loss to the customer. Most authorized payment scams are push payments which means that the payment instruction is sent by the payer to their bank. Examples are payments by mobile phone or home computer. By contrast, pull payment instructions are given by the payer to the payee who initiates the payment process through their own bank. Examples are cheques or direct debits. Pull payments are less prone to authorized payment scams, hence the focus on push payments.

Shareholder Stewardship: Autonomy and Sociality

Corporate Law

Private and public actors have traditionally conceived, diffused and accepted shareholder stewardship as a market-driven concept.  In my paper published in the Journal of Corporate Law Studies in 2023, I argue that there is another constitutive—and admittedly well hidden—element of stewardship that is more apt to fully grasp its distinctive features and to better inform market and public policy initiatives. This element, which I refer to as ‘stewardship sociality’, regards stewardship’s essence as a social norm that precedes and operates outside of any soft or hard law initiatives. 

Agency Law and Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence, Law of Agency

A feature of modern living today is the ubiquity of automated systems or artificial agents. Such agents are implementations of machine learning using neural networks and deep learning. They vary in their level of sophistication and complexity. What they have in common is that they supplant and automate processes that would otherwise require human intervention. An artificial agent’s choice of action at any instance depends on (a) its built-in knowledge and (b) the sequence of content its sensors have perceived (the agent’s percept sequence). The choice is effected by mapping every percept sequence to each choice of action, by way of different implementations or combinations of implementations known as ‘models’.  While humans, who have desires and preferences of their own, choose actions that produce desirable results from their point of view (or additionally, are morally, ethically and legally correct), machines do not have desires and preferences of their own.  Instead, an artificial agent is programmed to maximize its performance based on these models and one that does so successfully is said to exhibit ‘rationality’ or ‘intelligence’.

How Internet Governance is Evolving

International Law

A struggle is underway in internet governance between two competing governance structures. The first structure, multistakeholderism, continues in some ways the informality and public-private partnerships that have characterised the internet since its inception. Today however, internet governance is rapidly moving away from its multistakeholder origins towards an alternative structure rooted in multilateralism. I recently analysed the struggle between multistakeholderism and multilateralism, and the role played therein by international law, in ‘Another Swing of the Pendulum? The International Rule of Law and the “Splinternet”’ (published in Rule of Law in a Transitional Spectrum). This blog post briefly outlines the main contours of the struggle analysed in the longer piece.