Global Value Chains and the Law

As multinational enterprises and digital technologies reshape how goods, data, and services move across borders, this book delivers a legal analysis of global value chains—the networks that define global capitalism.

This book explores the complex legal and regulatory architecture underpinning today’s fragmented systems of global production.

As multinational enterprises and digital technologies reshape how goods, data, and services move across borders, the book delivers a legal analysis of global value chains (GVCs)—the networks that now define global capitalism.

Bringing together leading scholars from Europe and Asia, the book maps the emergence of a distinct “GVC law,” tracing how corporate transparency, mandatory due diligence, and private codes of conduct interact with evolving trade, competition, and private international law regimes.

Through 12 original chapters, contributors examine competing institutional frameworks—actor-driven, network-based, pluralist, and trade-oriented—that structure governance across jurisdictions. They reveal how legal pluralism, overlapping norms, and hybrid regulatory orders are transforming fundamental principles such as foreseeability, accountability, and access to justice.

Interdisciplinary in scope, the collection combines doctrinal, comparative, and socio-legal analysis to illuminate the emerging tensions between public regulation and private ordering, and between European due diligence models and Asian approaches emphasising soft law and corporate self-governance.

Global Value Chains and the Law is an essential book for legal academics, business scholars, policymakers, and practitioners concerned with transnational regulation, corporate sustainability, and responsible business conduct. It provides a timely, authoritative guide to the future of legal governance in a dynamic era of economic interdependence and global regulatory fragmentation.