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 13 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 & 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 an era of economic interdependence and global regulatory fragmentation.
Toshiyuki Kono is Professor of Law at Kyushu University, Japan.Mark Fenwick is Professor of International Business Law at the Graduate School of Law, Kyushu University, Japan.Emeric Prévost is Research Fellow at the University of Vienna, Austria.Ren Yatsunami is Associate Professor of Law at Kyushu University, Japan.
List of ContributorsIntroduction, Toshiyuki Kono (Kyushu University, Japan), Mark Fenwick (Kyushu University, Japan), Emeric Provost (University of Vienna, Austria) and Ren Yatusnami (Kyushu University, Japan)Part I: Frames and Understanding of the Global Value Chain and Private Law1. Institutions Meet Legal Pluralism: Regulation, Ordering and Power in Global Value Chains, Anna Beckers (Maastricht University, the Netherlands)2. EU Global Value Chain Legislation and International Trade Law: Aspiration and Reality, Hans Micklitz (European University Institute, Italy)3. Governance of Global Value Chains and Private International Law—From the Perspective of Private Ordering in a Legally Plural Normative Environment, Toshiyuki Kono (Kyushu University, Japan)4. Global Orchestration of Climate Change and Trade: Toward Synergistic Interagency Collaboration, Sungjoon Cho (Chicago-Kent University, USA)5. The Significance and Effectiveness of International Legal Regulation in Global Value Chains: An Economic Analysis, Kazuaki Kagami (Toyo University, Japan)Part II: Regulations and Policies Governing Private Law6. Governance Gaps on Global Value Chains from Private International Law: Potential of Law to Navigate Externalities, Ren Yatsunami (Kyushu University, Japan)7. The Transnational Fragmentation of Corporate Due Diligence and Civil Litigation in Global Value Chains: A French and Japanese Law Comparison, Yuriko Haga (Seikei University, Japan) and Emeric Prévost (University of Vienna, Austria)8. The Challenge of Foreseeability for the Private International Law Governance of Global Value Chains, Emeric Prévost (University of Vienna, Austria)Part III: Governance of Stakeholders in Private Law9. The Shifting Meaning of Compliance in Global Value Chains, Mark Fenwick (Kyushu University, Japan) and Erik P. M. Vermeulen (Tilburg University, the Netherlands, & Signify) 10. Conflict of Laws and Digital Product Passports in Cross-border Mineral Value Chains: A Call for International Traceability Law, Raven Yang (New South Wales Supreme Court, Australia) and Jie (Jeanne) Huang (University of Sydney, Australia)11. Legal Path Dependence Delaying the Legal Institutionalization of the Global Value Chains: An Argument Built Around Japan's Anti-Monopoly Law, Steven Van Uytsel (Kyushu University, Japan)12. Regulating Global Value Chains: The Promises and Perils of Due Diligence Laws?, Hisashi Harata (The University of Tokyo, Japan)