Considering the construction of transnational legal orders through the lens of a deep study of the aftermath of the Rana Plaza Factory building collapse in 2013.

1. Larry Catá Backer, Penn State University
Transnational Legal Orders:
Business and Regulatory Law
May 29, 2015
Law and Society Association Annual Meeting,
Seattle, WA
TRIAL BY FIRE:
RANA PLAZA AND TRANSNATIONAL LEGAL ORDERS

2. A Curious Ceremony
--Commemorating collapse
--Celebrating new governance architecture
--What new governance architecture?
l

3. The Puzzle
• Rana Plaza as template:
– Generalizing theory form context avoiding
• Reductionism
• instrumentalism
What kind of order?
--Transnational Legal Order
--Anarchic polycentric (dis)order
--State order reconfigured for globalization

4. The State of Supply in Bangladesh
• Building factories to meet sourcing demands
• Local owners
• Local factories
• Multinational corporations
– Supplier codes of conduct
– OECD Guidelines
– UNGP/Global Compact
– Local law

5. The Collapse
--Cracks
--Refusal to enter
--Coercion?
--Power failure and vibration of generators
--Collapse

6. Aftermath
• Arrests
• Accord
• Alliance
• Arrangement
• Lawsuits
• Multilateralism

7. From Context to Theory
– Is there a Transnational Legal Order here?
• Transnational
– MNEs, multilateralism
• Legal
– Focus on building and safety standards; contract relations
• Order(s)
– Perhaps one order
– Perhaps multiple interconnected public, private, state,
international and multilateral orders

8. Polycentric Ordering
• Order without a center
– Coherence without an ordering point or center
– Autonomous governance centers that might seek to intermesh but
not join each other;
– non-legal ordering
• Order in search of a center or other instrumental objectives
– (just another episodic brush with legal pluralism?
– Transitional ordering toward TLO
• Disorder
– Fragmentation without coherence

9. The Triumph of the State
• A return to internationalist ordering pre 1914
• Vertically arranged state system in which sourcing states
retain sovereignty
• MNEs as agents of the fully sovereign states
• PIOs as creatures of the states dominated by powerful states

10. Conclusion
The state of transnational
governance today may be much like
the Rana Plaza factory building on
April 23, 2013
--theory factories produce material
spun from context woven together
--is the building sound?
--too early to tell.