Oren Perez, professor of law at Bar-Ilan University, will deliver the Pierre Genest Memorial Lecture on Oct. 13 from 12:30 to 2pm in the Ignat Kaneff Building, Room 2027.
The title of the lecture, “Private Transnational Regulation as Networked Governance”, will examine how the conventional treaty-based system is struggling to cope with the challenges faced by the global society.
Perez has an LLB (Magna Cum Laude) from Tel Aviv University, an LLM (1997) and PhD (2001) from London School of Economics and Political Science, as well as a BA in philosophy, University of London (2015). He primarily works in the fields of environmental regulation, transnational law, legal theory and e-democracy.
His lecture will highlight that failure is evident in various areas, including climate change, labor rights in ship breaking yards in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan and global bio-diversity, and will focus on the new hybrid system of global governance that has evolved in the past decade with the emergence of private transnational regulatory schemes and examine its regulatory capacities.
In particular, the lecture will expose the network structure of the new system, focusing on the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the transnational (private) codes that govern it. The field of CSR-Codes is of particular interest because it covers many of the issues that are governed by conventional public international law regimes.
Perez will argue that analyzing the system of CSR-Codes through the prism of network theory is critical for understanding its institutional structure and its regulatory efficacy. He will present a new theoretical framework based on two ideas: ensemble regulation and networked signaling. This framework draws on three bodies of literature: network theory, transnational legal theory and theories of signaling (which were developed in parallel in economics and in biology).
Further, he will discuss in this context the findings of a novel empirical study conducted in the past 2 years, which utilizes the technique of social network analysis (SNA) to study the CSR-Codes network. This is the first work in the transnational governance literature that undertakes an empirical study on such a scale.
Perez is the recipient of several prestigious grants, including a Foreign and Commonwealth Office Scholarship (Chevening Scholarship) and a Marie Curie Fellowship (during his studies at LSE) and various research grants, including grants from the Israeli Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Science and the Israel Science Foundation.
All are welcome to attend, the lecture and lunch will be provided. To RSVP, visit www.osgoode.yorku.ca/research/rsvp.
The Pierre Genest Memorial Fund was established to honour the memory of Pierre Genest, who died in 1989. Genest graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School in 1954 and became one of the finest counsels in Canada, respected not only for his gifts as a lawyer and an advocate, but also for his personal qualities. It brings distinguished legal scholars to Osgoode to deliver the Pierre Genest Memorial Lecture.