Law, Geopolitics and De-Globalization

Catalog description

The globalization trend that began with the Bretton Woods Agreement has now reversed, with the world breaking apart into regional silos with their own international arrangements, legal systems, and commercial norms. This fundamentally transforms the job of lawyers engaged in international business and other forms of exchange. This seminar will explore the process of globalization, de-globalization and its consequences, particularly for U.S. transactional lawyers. US relations with China will serve as the most important bilateral manifestation of the trend and its legal, financial, and geopolitical implications although the course will touch upon other regions as well. The format will comprise weekly lectures and discussions with readings and short writing assignments or group projects. The first third of the seminar will explore the broader phenomenon of deglobalization and its general implications, including such topics as due diligence, financial and commercial law and its enforcement, and ownership of raw data; the second, the tools available to address specific problems such as legal uncertainty and risk mitigation; and the third, case studies showing how those tools are effectively, or ineffectively, applied in the real world. The seminar will conclude with exercises designed to give students the opportunity to identify problems and devise remedial strategies. The specific problems will stem from topics that appear in the news, which will demonstrate the immediate relevance of what the course covers. Students will be evaluated based on their periodic short papers and the quality of their class participation. My intention is to distribute the workload equally across the term in the expectation that the students will be engaged for every session rather than focusing disproportionately on the final week.