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Recent Submissions

Connected Vehicles and Data Privacy & Sovereignty in the Global South
(Tech Policy Press, 2024-10-23) Ekott, Uduak; Che, Zhe; Tantratian, Attamongkol
This essay examines data privacy and data sovereignty concerns associated with connected vehicles, with particular attention to countries in the Global South. It considers the collection and cross-border transfer of personal and vehicle data, surveys data protection and localization frameworks in several jurisdictions, and discusses regulatory approaches that importing countries may adopt to protect privacy and digital sovereignty.
Jetstream2 Community Assessment Summary Report
(Indiana University, 2026-09-01) Wernert, Julie A.; Miles, Tonya
This document summarizes the results of the 2026 Jetstream2 Community Assessment conducted among 3,325 individuals from April 2 through May 8, 2026. This was the fourth assessment conducted as part of the National Science Foundation–funded Jetstream2 project, which was awarded in 2020 and began operations in 2022. It also marks the ninth survey of the broader Jetstream community.
The Global Reporting Initiative, Transnational Corporate Accountability, and Global Regulatory Counter-Currents.
(UC Irving Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law, 2016) Williams, Cynthia A.
In this essay, the Author provides an overview in Part I of some initiatives to require or encourage companies to produce specific ESG data, authored both by governments and by private standard-setters. In Part II, one disclosure initiative in particular will be discussed as an example of a transnational legal order (TLO), as defined by Professors Shaffer and Halliday, and that is the Global Reporting Initiative, which has become the benchmark corporate social disclosure framework. Part III identifies a number of significant questions about our knowledge of the real power of information strategies to change corporate behavior, as the GRI seeks to do, as well as questions about the efficacy of self-regulation generally. Part IV then asserts that the "legality" aspect is a centrally-important element of the TLO framework advanced by Shaffer and Halliday. Particularly regarding transnational corporate responsibility, reliance has been placed almost exclusively on "new governance" initiatives, which are generally non-binding, voluntary, collaboratively developed standards for responsible behavior. New governance standards have fascinated academics from a wide range of fields, including this author, leading to an explosion of literature on the cognate topics over the last ten to fifteen years. Yet, during this same period of time, Bi-lateral Investment Treaties (BITs) and free-trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), have been negotiated throughout the world. These treaties generally permit private companies to challenge any government action-legislative, regulatory, or judicial-that is alleged to reduce the company's future profits. These challenges are heard by private arbitrators and are not subject to judicial review. The contrast is stark between new governance forms of collaborative, often industry-led, voluntary standards for responsible action, and the limits on sovereign regulatory authority being developed as a result of the expansion of the investor state system for arbitration pursuant to BITs and trade agreements, leading this author to remember the line in the movie the Witard of Ott: "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." To badly mix literary references, we may have fixed our collective attention on the construction of a transnational regulatory Potemkin village even as the man behind the curtain progressively undermines the capacity of the strong form of regulation, that of sovereign domestic law. It is in emphasizing the importance of legality and how transnational norms "touch down" in binding processes, court proceedings, contracts, or public proceedings that Shaffer and Halliday's theory of Transnational Legal Orders reorients our thinking in a productive, and important, direction. Part V concludes.
Can Soft Regulation Prevent Financial Crises?: The Dutch Central Bank's Supervision of Behavior and Culture.
(Cornwell International Journal, 2018-11-14) Williams, Cynthia A.; Conley, John M.; Smeehuijzen, Lodewijk; Rupp, Deborah
Financial regulation has traditionally been “hard”: national legislatures and regulators (and sometimes international bodies) require certain kinds of behavior and forbid others, on pain of business sanctions, fines, or even criminal penalties. When a financial crisis happens, the usual after-the-fact response is more hard regulation. That pattern goes back at least to the 1929 market crash that precipitated the Great Depression. But financial crises still occur, leading many observers to wonder if what the financial world needs is a way to identify those pathological risk-takers in advance and, perhaps more importantly, to make sure that the financial institutions that employ them discover and control them. Such an approach to financial governance might be characterized as “soft” regulation: rather than relying on prescribing, proscribing, and punishing specific actions, it would focus on education and persuasion (still backed up by the threat of sanctions) to encourage financial institutions to head off excessive risk-taking before it occurs. This Article presents in-depth study of the first major effort to put this theory into practice: De Nederlansche Bank’s (DNB; the central bank of the Netherlands) novel initiative to promote a healthy corporate culture in the large banks that is supervises. Despite its radical originality, this initiative has been almost entirely unreported in the U.S. legal and business literatures. DNB’s traditional mandate has been to ensure the stability and integrity of the national financial system by promulgating and enforcing regulations and supervising individual banks. In response to the 2007-08 financial crisis, of 2007-2008 DNB has expanded its supervision to include the evaluation of both individual behavior and group-level culture — “Behaviour & Culture” (B&C) supervision. We have investigated the history and theoretical roots of B&C supervision; interviewed both the regulators and the regulated about their practical perspectives; explored relevant themes in law and the social sciences; and considered the implications of B&C supervision for banking regulation elsewhere. We conclude that, while the response to B&C supervision has been generally positive, its tangible effect remains unproven. Moreover, its relatively positive reception may depend on the specific business culture of the Netherlands, which casts doubt on whether it can be exported to larger banking systems.
Proxy Voting Reform: What Is on the Agenda, What Is Not on the Agenda, and Why It Matters for Asset Owners.
(Boston University Law Review, 2019-05) Williams, Cynthia A.
Investor proxy voting practices have entered the public spotlight again in 2018 as Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") consider changes to the rules which govern proxy voting and regulation of proxy advisors. The focus has largely been on companies 'frustration with an asserted out-sized influence of proxy advisory firms and the corporate community's long standing pushback to shareholder proposals, especially those dealing with environmental, social, and governance ("ESG') issues. However, an accurate recognition of the longstanding principles which underlie institutional investors 'fiduciary duties and provide the legal context for the exercise of proxy voting rights has been largely missing from the debate. In this Article, we explore current fiduciary duties of institutional investors, asset managers, and proxy advisors and how those legal principles apply to processes for analysis, voting and oversight of proxies on behalf of fund beneficiaries. We also review what current research shows concerning the financial effects of material ESG issues. We conclude that fiduciaries, when voting, monitoring or advising on voting, must apply an up-to-date understanding of fiduciary duties and must correspondingly evaluate how ESG factors and systemic risks can often be material economic issues at individual companies and across industries. We counsel that fundamental-fiduciary duty principles require more explicit and forward-looking attention in proxy voting processes to (1) evolution in research on ESG factors and the knowledge base which are driving changes in voting trends, (2) balancing intergenerational short- and long-horizon transfers of risk and return, (3) aggregate influence of systemic risks that can spread across companies and compound over time; (4) improved asset owner oversight of investment manager and proxy advisor business model conflicts of interest, and (5) cost-benefit advantages of collaborative asset owner and investment manager use of proxy and other advisors. Thus, concerns expressed in Congress and at the SEC about integrity of the proxy voting system largely miss the mark because they come from a perspective that is outdated and misguided.

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