Addressing Moral Confusion: The Right and Wrong of Exploitation

Sometimes voluntary agreements that are beneficial to all parties can still be unethical. This occurs when the benefits of the agreement are unfairly divided among the parties. The benefits of a mutually beneficial transaction might be exploitative, meaning that one party unconscionably takes advantage of the vulnerability of another party. World poverty, globalization, and environmental disasters present a special challenges where exploitation could occur, but also where people’s good intentions might cause them to refuse to make trades that are beneficial for fear of being exploitative.

Part VI Actors, Ch.39 Sub-National Actors

This chapter explores the evolving role of sub-national actors in international environmental law. As a matter of formal law, international environmental law is formed among sovereign nation-states; sub-national actors are treated as sub-units of their nation-states. However, sub-national actors, through transnational networks, are playing a growing role in international environmental governance. The chapter focuses on three aspects of sub-national actors' participation in international environmental law. First, it considers why including sub-national actors is crucial to solving international environmental problems. Second, it examines the emergence of networks interacting with international environmental law-making and each other at transnational, national, and sub-national scales. Third, it analyses how those networks interact directly with the formal processes of international environmental law-making and develop the parallel voluntary agreements in which sub-national actors pledge to uphold commitments made by nation-states.

The Recognition and Enforcement of UK Insolvency Proceedings in Spain After a Hard-Brexit. Special Reference to Schemes of Arrangement

After Brexit, the United Kingdom will become a third State to all effects. As far as insolvency is related, this will imply substantial changes regarding the recognition and enforcement of the UK insolvency proceedings. This paper purports to analyze the consequences a Hard-Brexit will have on insolvency-related matters, by describing the effects that should be expected with regard to the recognition in Spain of each of the proceedings that the UK legislation foresees for financially distressed debtors, namely administration, winding-up, voluntary agreements, bankruptcy and schemes of arrangement (which are dealt with separately due to their hybrid nature).

Foreign Influence and Domestic Policy

In an interconnected world, economic and political interests inevitably reach beyond national borders. Since policy choices generate external economic and political costs, foreign state and non-state actors have an interest in influencing policy actions in other sovereign countries to their advantage. Foreign influence is a strategic choice aimed at internalizing these externalities and takes three principal forms: (i) voluntary agreements, (ii) policy interventions based on rewarding or sanctioning the target country to obtain a specific change in policy, and (iii) institution interventions aimed at influencing the political institutions in the target country. We propose a unifying theoretical framework to study when foreign influence is chosen and in which form, and use it to organize and evaluate the new political economics literature on foreign influence along with work in cognate disciplines (JEL D72, D74, F51, F53, P26, P33).

They Live and They Make Consumer Law a Poor Instrument of Distributive Justice

Even though consumer contract law concerns voluntary agreements between private parties, it is often considered to be an instrument of the principle of distributive justice, according to which the design of social institutions should benefit the worse-off members of society. The article claims that such a view is mistaken. It appeals to the so-called status quo argument, according to which interpreting consumer law as an instrument of distributive justice may entrench the current, unjust state of affairs, and therefore compound, rather than eradicate, distributive injustice. Within that framework, consumer law is treated as the legal instantiation of consumer culture, which, even if not inherently unjust, poses several risks for individuals and their overall wellbeing. Apart from presenting the abstract argument, the article illustrates it with a vivid example from popular culture – John Carpenter’s iconic film They Live.

Sodium content in meat products: suitability to labeling and the voluntary agreements

This study was undertaken to evaluate the sodium concentration in meat products, to ascertain their appropriateness for labels and agreements set up between the Health Ministry and the Brazilian Association of Food Industries. A total of 96 meat derivative samples (italian salami, chicken pate, cooked ham, ham, sausage, bologna, tuscan sausage and smoked mixed sausage) were collected from different brands and batches. Using flame emission spectroscopy, the samples were analyzed for sodium levels based on the official methodology. It was observed that 46.9% of the companies showed values in nutritional labeling to be noncompliant with the Brazilian legislation. In fact, 31.2% of the brands assessed failed to satisfy the sodium reduction target decided upon for 2017. The italian salami was the product with the higher sodium content present a average value among the brands of 1716.11 mg 100 g-1. It became evident that merely implementing voluntary agreements had failed to provide total adequacy in the sodium content of the meat products. There is also great need for the industries to be more engaged in finding substitutes to minimize the sodium levels in the foods, without inducing significant alterations in the physicochemical, microbiological and technological features of the products, apart from the higher inspection by the government agencies in terms of agreement compliance and population awareness.