Overview
Stanford Law School's approach to international law, business, and policy
presents an integrated plan involving innovative coursework and complementary
research and outreach activities designed to address the key areas of change in
the global political economy, transnational business environment, and
developing international legal structure
The primary objectives of this program are:
- to develop an innovative curriculum of legal, business organization, and
policy studies responsive to the changing context of international legal
practice and the academic needs and professional interests of Stanford Law
School students and faculty;
- to organize complementary programs of research, policy analysis, and
continuing education in the field of international law and institutions; and
- to establish and maintain a program of multiple interactions in these areas
between Stanford Law School faculty, students and graduate fellows, lawyers,
policy makers, multinational corporations, and other interested participants in
international legal practice.
The Law School's international course offerings accommodate a wide range of
interests, including not only corporate, capital markets, banking, technology
and antitrust issues, but also nonprofit and governmental or administrative
organizations. As a result, the Law School offers a JD legal education program
coordinating curriculum with research and outreach activities and, as
appropriate, opportunities for international study and externships.
Changing Context of International Law, Business, and Policy
The Law School's curriculum emphasizes the most prominent developments
shaping new global and regional dynamics:
- the increasing prevalence of the conduct of international business by
complex enterprises operating within and across multiple host nations, and the
growing importance of the interaction between these enterprises and the
variable national systems of corporate governance and finance, industrial
relations, administrative regulation and social and environmental policy that
shape organizational structure and practice;
- the reorientation of legal thought and practice toward transitional and
developing economies, particularly in Asia and Latin America, with emphasis on
strengthening institutions that support free markets and the rule of law;
- the movement in advanced industrial economies from trade dominated by
manufactured products to greater specialization and competition in the
provision of services and intangible assets (e.g., intellectual property and
know-how; engineering, financial, and legal services);
- the need for alternative business and legal strategies to prosper in a world
of increasingly open global markets and multiple overlapping and competing
regional and multinational legal regimes (e.g., World Trade Organization,
international standards committees, European Union, NAFTA, and Asia-Pacific
Economic Cooperation);
- the need, in a world in which exclusive claims of national sovereignty and
the boundaries of national borders are weakened by the recognition of
transnational economic integration and the expansion of international law
protecting fundamental human rights, to focus attention on corporate governance
and obligations, including fair labor standards and environmental
responsibility, and the humane treatment of workers, migrants, and
women—and, in the context of ethnic conflict and the dissolution of
states, all civilians—under regional legal systems and global legal
systems;
- the extensive efforts to negotiate successful international agreements on a
wide range of environmental, security, trade and intellectual property issues,
from negotiations to expand the benefits and responsibilities of global trade,
intellectual property and technology transfer regimes to multilateral efforts
to achieve global carbon emissions reductions in the context of destabilizing
global climate change scenarios, from agreements more effectively regulating
the use and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to international and
regional mediation efforts to stop ethnic cleansing and civil wars; and
- the recognition that international governance of global
problems—including the environment, health, corruption, human
rights—require cooperative efforts by multinational business and leading
NGOs in an era of limited sovereign power. These concerns are manifest both in
calls for new corporate social responsibility and new legal forms of private
liability for failure to exercise such responsibilities.