CHAINLAW develops a novel conceptual and normative legal language for Global Value Chains (GVCs). GVCs are largely unknown as legal categories. This is highly problematic when the law is starting to legislate or decides cases about supply-chain responsibility. The core aim of CHAINLAW is to provide the concepts necessary for the law to be able to develop appropriate legislation for GVCs and approach cases involving supply-chain liability. The project does so by applying a combination of theoretical, doctrinal, empirical, technical, and normative analysis on the law of GVCs. CHAINLAW is ground-breaking by employing, first, a novel theoretical framework based on institutional theory that sets up a threefold legal typology of GVCs, thereby allowing their qualifications as part of the company, as contracts, and as a network simultaneously. CHAINLAW engages, secondly, in a multi-disciplinary analysis that traces this institutional understanding within various regulatory layers that govern GVCs and that include formal law, private and technological regulation. It proposes an analysis of the law on GVCs that integrates (i) legal doctrinal analysis of company and contract law and the legal debate on networks, (ii) socio-legal research on private regulation and documentary practices that are set up by companies (creating ‘paper trails’), contracting parties and within the GVC network, and (iii) socio-technical analysis of supply-chain technologies, as used by companies, commercial parties, and in networked processes. Third, CHAINLAW uses these insights to develop a strategy for how the law can govern GVCs, in private law including liability and through public law intervention. A final objective of CHAINLAW is to use the findings these regulatory layers in GVCs to develop a new responsive dogmatic approach to be able to study overlapping institutional layers in GVCs and the regulatory effects that they produce. We propose a doctrinal, private regulatory and digital GVC law for making GVCs work through law.
