POLYCENTRICITY AND POLYPHONY IN INTERNATIONAL LAW: INTERPRETING THE CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY TO RESPECT HUMAN RIGHTS

Complex multi-actors and multi-level governance structures have emerged in areas that were traditionally exclusively the preserve of the State and treaty-making. The adoption of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP) affirmed a corporate responsibility to respect human rights to be implemented through human rights due diligence (HRDD), ie via management processes. The open-ended character of the UNGP generated the emergence of other soft instruments offering guidance to corporations in structuring HRDD. This contribution conceptualises the UNGP from the perspective of regulation as a principles-based exercise in polycentric governance reliant on regulatory intermediaries for interpretation. It then assesses the role of various sui generis normative instruments in providing interpretation to the UNGP and, how the presence of an additional layer of interpretative material contributes to the institutionalisation of responsible corporate conduct. The analysis of instruments drafted by international, non-governmental and business organisations reveals both a decentralising tension between different intermediaries due to disagreements and divergence concerning the precise extent of corporate human rights responsibilities, as well as attempts to centralise the interpretation of the UNGP. The article concludes by recommending some caution towards the employment of polycentric governance regimes and their lack of centralised interpretive authority in this domain of international law and suggests possible ways to formally establish centralised interpretation.

Hero or villain? Moral ambiguity and narrative structure under the Comics Code in 1950s Superman stories

This article explores the decades-long influence of the Comics Code on American comic books’ storytelling form by identifying the interpretive processes underlying the Code’s application and adapting the Code as a theoretical model for approaching the narrative structure and implied ethical stance within 1950s Superman comics. Instead of treating the Comics Code as a series of regulations seemingly interpreted arbitrarily, this article explores how interpretive issues were framed by figures such as Charles Murphy, Leonard Darvin and John Goldwater to identify ‘the spirit and intent of the Code’ and resolve challenges such as distinguishing between the ‘spirit’ and ‘letter’ of the Code, identifying interpretive authority outside the Code, weighing past interpretive precedent and locating authorial ‘intent’. Ambiguities and aporia within the Code’s language demanded that administrators reconstruct the Code’s possible meanings and conceptualize ‘justice’ by distinguishing between the Code’s general preferences and actual prohibitions, resolving terminological nuance and prioritizing conflicting stipulations. Administrators’ efforts to balance competing stipulations regarding characters’ physical unattractiveness, criminality, justice and institutional authority shaped comics’ storytelling form and perpetuated ambiguities that comic creators could ‐ intentionally or unintentionally ‐ exploit. Where Silver Age DC Comics have often been viewed as sacrificing psychological complexity to plotting and social conformity, this article argues that the plotting intricacy in several 1950s Comics-Code era Superman comics in fact enabled writers to present a more complex rendering of moral issues. Where the Comics Code explicitly forbade that ‘crimes’ be ‘presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal’, the Comics Code’s own textually unstable meaning ‐ coupled with the narrative complexity of the stories’ plotting, shifting points of view and situational and dramatic irony ‐ enabled 1950s Superman writers to create sympathy for a supposed ‘criminal’, depict the frequent inaccuracy of assumed knowledge and introduce moral ambiguity, all while arguably ‘following’ the Code.

The Relationship between the European Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation: Conflicting Conceptions of Sovereignty in Strasbourg and St Petersburg

Russia eagerly ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in 1998. Twenty years later, the chair of its Constitutional Court now expresses resentment at the subordination of Russian sovereignty. A new law expands his Court’s jurisdiction to deny effect to judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, an unprecedented power that has already been used twice. This article analyses this law and its application in its first two years. Both the claim of ‘subordination’ and the Russian response to it, in law and practice, rest on weak legal ground. But Russia’s action also raises deeper theoretical and practical questions for the ECHR as a ‘living instrument’ subject to the ‘evolutive’ interpretations of the Strasbourg Court. If other member states mimic Russia’s response to these issues, a European human rights system premised on the final interpretive authority of an international court could come to its end.

Roy Porter Student Prize Essay How (Not) to Survive a Plague: The Theology of Fleeing Disease in Sixteenth-century England

Early modern medicine favoured flight as the best prophylactic against epidemic disease. Theologically, however, flight savoured of an attempt to defy divine providence, or a dereliction of Christian charity, while staying could seem an act of presumption or recklessness. This essay studies six theologians whose writings on the issue circulated in sixteenth-century England. Long dismissed as inconclusive and derivative, these ‘flight theologies’ can be better understood as products of theological principle and communal experience, whose combined influence precluded definitive prescriptions. Instead, authors marshalled the rhetoric of ‘conscience’ to displace the decision back onto their readers, while retaining interpretive authority over the key factors of Scripture and personal obligations. Flight theology thus seeks less to solve a practical problem, than to produce a particular kind of political subjectivity, bound to the community and predicated on persuasion. In so doing, the discourse fuelled the emergence of an early modern English public sphere.

Germany’s Postwar Constitution

The German Federal Constitutional Court granted extensive horizontal effect to the rights in Germany’s constitution, the Basic Law, starting in the late 1950s. This chapter lays out the institutional and normative context against which these moves played out and in light of which they made sense. The new Court spent its first decade fending off attempts to marginalize it, not only from the executive branch but also from Germany’s other, more established, high courts. At the same time, the new Basic Law furnished the Court with interpretive authority over an expansive set of new rights, while the private law establishment was slow to satisfy the normative demands of a liberalizing postwar Germany.