The thesis answers the following research question: what is the extent of the influence of international law on the construction and application of corporate codes of conduct, what factors determine this influence and through which processes does it occur? The thesis uses a mix of methods: a content analysis study, used to measure the extent to which codes of conduct incorporate international labour standards and the degree to which they have changed over time in this respect; legal research on whether corporations can be liable for violating their codes and how this risk factors in the drafting of codes; and case studies of fifteen retailer corporations, which examine how their codes were created and how they are being applied. The study's findings show there is an influence of international law on the construction and, to a far smaller degree, on the application of codes. The creation and application of codes is a politicised and contested process and codes are based on international law principally due to the pressure exerted by trade unions and NGOs, but also due to reputational risk, commercial pressure and mimicry by corporations. This influence has been selective, with corporations applying provisions in their codes that protect the rights carrying the biggest reputational risks. These findings show the flaws in the current international framework for corporate accountability, which is based on self-regulation through codes and audits. They also raise issue of whether changes, such as a binding international treaty or the creation of more collaborative and inclusive programmes to oversee the application of codes, may be required in order to ensure wider respect for labour rights of workers.

In this project, I look at the work of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) and the role that brokers at the organization play in constructing, promoting, and institutionalizing a body of LGBT human rights. While a great deal is being written about the diffusion of LGBT politics and human rights discourses from the Global North, there are few ethnographic analyses of who is doing the exporting, how, and toward what ends. Based on a year of fieldwork in IGLHRC’s New York and Cape Town offices, I look at the history of IGLHRC, the interactions among brokers and how these shape their daily work, how brokers understand their mandate and the hybridity that it so often requires, and how partnership with groups in the Global South, the production, verification, and circulation of information, and the possibilities and constraints of the formal human rights arena all shape the work that brokers do. Ultimately, I conclude that human rights advocacy must be understood holistically if it is to be understood at all. Such advocacy always necessarily involves a degree of theoretical elaboration, promotion, and codification by human rights defenders and NGOs, and focusing exclusively on one or another of these aspects paints a skewed portrait of what it means to work within a human rights framework. Drawing from the anthropology of sexuality, queer theory, literature on brokerage, and interdisciplinary studies of transnational advocacy networks, this project aims to deepen understandings of how LGBT NGOs and the brokers that animate them regularly engage in the construction, promotion, and institutionalization of particular understandings of sexuality and the claims that can be made by sexual subjects globally.

Novelty is a widespread notion that has not been given commensurate critical attention. This research is an ethnographically-inclined exploration of practices surrounding the accomplishment of novelty in an institution for which novelty is a central notion: the patent system of the United Kingdom. The research is based on interviews with patent examiners at the UK patent office, interviews with patent attorneys at various legal firms, and documentary analysis of legislation and numerous legal judgments. The thesis brings to bear themes from Science and Technology Studies and ethnomethodology to assess the extent to which they can account for the practices surrounding novelty in the UK patent system. As a fundamental legal requirement for the patentability of inventions, novelty is a central part of the practices of patent composition, assessment and contestation. Rather than being a straightforward technical criterion, however, novelty is shown to be a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon emerging from interwoven legal, bureaucratic and individual practices. The local resolution of whether or not a given invention is new, and the cross-institutional coherence of novelty as a practicable notion, raise questions concerning ontology, accountability, scale and inconcludability, and provide an opportunity for empirically grounded engagement with these longstanding analytical concerns.

The dissertation solves the empirical puzzle why similar regimes such as Morocco and Jordan vary in their engagement in family law reform between 1999 and 2013. Differences with respect to family law reform in the two monarchies are threefold: the way the reform processes were carried out, the content of the new family codes that were issued in Morocco in 2004 and in Jordan in 2010, and the way the laws were applied. Using Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice as a theoretical framework the dissertation establishes the links between the designs of the legal systems, how reform processes are carried out, the family laws countries end up with, and the way the laws are applied. French and British colonialism had shaped the legal systems of Morocco and Jordan to different degrees, producing a legal system that was unified after independence in Morocco whereas the Jordanian one continued to be divided into regular and religious courts. As a result, Moroccan family courts are less autonomous and more subjected to political decisions than Jordanian sharia courts. The institutional design of both judicial systems affected how family law reform was carried out because those systems contain biases towards different actors who are seen as competent of reforming family law and thus came to influence the reform process. The different access criteria to the juridical fields promote different types of cultural capital, so that actors participating in the process have different preferences regarding the development of the content of family law. In Jordan, the absence of the Jordanian king allowed the sharia court administration to exploit the structural bias in its favour and come to dominate both the process and content of family law reform. For this reason the 2010 Jordanian family law reflects to a lesser extent the demands of women's groups. The absence of the Jordanian king from the reform process demonstrates that change in authoritarian states is not necessarily imposed from above nor is it predetermined from the beginning. The Jordanian reform process saw little engagement from the top-level of the regime and could be classified as a mid-level process. It was led by a government body, the sharia court administration, which however enjoyed relative autonomy from the upper echelon of the regime. By contrast, the Moroccan family law reform was a textbook example of authoritarian politics, the reform being imposed from above and the king playing a leading role during the process. In contrast to the process and content of reform, the application of the reformed law in Morocco challenges the notion of the omnipotent authoritarian regime. While the monarch could impose legislative change, the state is at best partially able to enforce this very law or to impose a consensus over its interpretation. The designs of the legal systems again had an impact here. International law occupies different places in the Moroccan and Jordanian constitutions: Jordanian sharia courts enjoy greater autonomy, reject international law, and thus were able to resist its intrusion.

Unlike in the Ottoman world, the exercise of judicial power in nineteenth century Qajar Iran was not contingent upon formal appointment by the political authority. In accordance with the dominant Ṣūlī theory, it derived from the perceived intellectual ability of a cleric to infer the ruling of God (Ḥukmullāh) from the sources of Twelver Shī'ī law through deductive effort (ijtihād). Like the Ottoman qāḍī, the Qajar Uṣūlī jurist or mujtahid known as Ḥākim-i shar' in a judicial context had both notarial and adjudicative powers. The Qajar jurist could thus authenticate, register, annul legal documents and act as an arbiter in lawsuits. The Qajar jurist could also, however, issue a legal opinion. This was the role of the muftī – a separate judicial office in other parts of the Islamic world. Qajar jurists exercised their extensive judicial powers through a network of informal sharī'a courts, which they came to operate in most Iranian towns and cities largely independent of direct state control. While the notarial aspects of the Qajar sharī'a court have received some scholarly attention, this study aims to investigate the role of the jurist and his ruling (Ḥukm-i shar') in sharī'a litigation (murāfa'a pl. –āt).

The subject of 'independence' of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) has emerged as a key issue in post-apartheid South African public discourse. While the importance of 'independence' has rarely been questioned, the term's meaning has been subject to fragmented understandings and vague interpretations. This thesis explores the origins of divergent conceptions of 'independence', examining how these conceptions are constructed by staff within the SABC. The central task of this thesis is to critically examine the contested concept of 'independence' a task it accomplishes by engaging with issues of power, knowledge and identity. To this end, the thesis reveals that the neo-liberal policies imposed by the Washington Consensus play a significant role in shaping conceptions of 'independence' through their power to dictate policy in countries in the Global South, including South Africa. This power, exercised through dominant Washington Consensus institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), inform knowledge and identities at a local level through the adoption of neo-liberal macro-economic strategies, such as Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR). As a result, there is no local without the global. The engagement with issues of power, identity and knowledge and their relationships to how 'independence' is understood ensures that meanings of 'independence' are contested and that 'independence' is not an immovable edifice. 'Independence' is only a product of an evolving matrix, in which the staff of the SABC, who are divided into four different tiers, construct their own interpretations of 'independence', shaped by their understandings of both organisational and external factors, such as politics and advertisers, in relation to their work. Using data from interview respondents and an analysis of key public policy documents, this thesis presents two key processes that influence understandings of 'independence' and, therefore, link the SABC to the larger external socio-political environment. These two key factors, the commercialisation of the SABC and the African National Congress (ANC) power struggles have helped to shape the four conceptions of 'independence' advanced in this thesis: namely, the legalistic, anti-establishment, political and professional conceptions of 'independence'. At the core of this thesis are two questions: How do staff within the SABC construct and understand the meaning of 'independence' of the SABC, and what has influenced these conceptions in post-apartheid South Africa? Consistent with these research questions, the thesis is located within the interpretive tradition, since it seeks to understand the world of the SABC through the lens of its staff. To complement the interpretivist approach, the thesis situates the SABC and its understandings of 'independence' within the wider South African context, in which the meaning of 'independence' should also be understood as being inextricably intertwined with and a product of the shifting developmental state of the macro-economic environment. The critical political economy of the media is, therefore, used as an explanatory framework for understanding how the macro-worlds of politics and economic strategies intersect within the micro-world of the SABC to shape conceptions of 'independence'. The thesis concludes by arguing that it is not a strong and domineering state that seeks to control public service broadcasting; instead, it is a weak state that does so because of a need to curtail public discourse, which might present a threat to its own existence if left uncontrolled. As a result, it is difficult to separate the SABC from the state and, for that reason, the role of the public service broadcaster (PSB) is tied to the national narrative which itself is tied to the larger global matrices of power.

This thesis investigates the potentially complex power effects generated in Online Social Networking Sites (‘OSNS’), such as YouTube and Facebook, when legal values, such as copyright and personal data, are protected and/or violated. In order to develop this analysis, in Chapter Two, I critically analyse key academic writings on internet regulation and argue that I need to move away from the dominant ‘regulatory’ lens to my Actor-Network Theory-Foucauldian Power Lens (‘ANT-Foucauldian Power Lens’) in order to be able to capture the potentially complex web of power effects generated in YouTube and Facebook when copyright and personal data are protected and/or violated. In Chapter Three, I develop my ANT-Foucauldian Power Lens and explore how key ANT ideas such as translation can be used in conjunction with Foucauldian ideas such as governmentality. I utilise my ANT-Foucauldian Power Lens in Chapters Four to Seven to analyse how YouTube and Facebook are constructed as heterogeneous, contingent and precarious ‘actor-networks’ and I map in detail the complex power effects generated from specific local connections. I argue five key points. Firstly, I suggest that complex, multiple, and contingent power effects are generated when key social, legal, and technological actants are locally, contingently, and precariously ‘fitted together’ in YouTube and Facebook when copyright and personal data are protected and/or violated. Secondly, I argue that ‘materialities’ play key roles in maintaining the power effects generated by specific local connections. Thirdly, I argue that there are close links between power and ‘spatialities’ through my analysis of the Privacy Settings and Tagging in Facebook. Fourthly, I argue that my relational understandings of YouTube and Facebook generate a more comprehensive view of the power effects of specific legal elements such as how specific territorial laws in YouTube gain their authority by virtue of their durable and heterogeneous connections. Finally, I argue that we can extrapolate from my empirical findings to build a small-scale theory about the power effects generated in OSNS when legal values are protected and/or violated. Here I also consider the contributions made by my research to three distinct fields, namely, internet regulation, socio-legal studies, and actor-network theory.

Recent policies in England and Wales and the United States have recognised for the first time enforcement mechanisms for victims of crime under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (CVRA) in the United States as well the Code of Practice for Victims of Crime in England and Wales (the Code). Although very different from one another, these policies ostensibly aimed to provide a stronger commitment to victims’ rights, by recognising an accessible, timely and impartial process that recognises accountability and provides individual remedies in cases of breaches. This thesis engages in a careful in-depth analysis of these mechanisms and their implementation based on elite qualitative interviews, case law analysis and a multidisciplinary examination of the relevant literature. It argues that on the whole, these mechanisms have presented a number of limitations, and thus in many respects cannot and have not delivered accessible, and timely means to respond to victims’ rights breaches. Most importantly, it demonstrates that for certain types of breaches and in certain contextual settings, these mechanisms have recognised only limited or no redress at all for breaches. This research takes the available victims’ literature further by arguing that many of these promises have been closer to rhetoric than reality and providing a more nuanced portrait of the substantial difficulties and limitations that relate to these enforcement mechanisms. In effect, these limitations can be understood in light of the nature and structural components of these selected mechanisms, as well as the ways they have been implemented by the main actors involved in these processes and the different contexts under which the different types of breaches take place. Finally, despite their limitations, when compared to one another, each mechanism can be considered a better option for access, timeliness and redress – depending on context and the type of breach. Following from this analysis, a complementary approach is developed which can facilitate and increase opportunity for redress for a wider range of situations. It is important to bear in mind however the limits of the complementary approach; namely, that it only includes elements inspired from the two mechanisms examined in this thesis and that there are several limitations that relate to transplants and policy transfers.

The Kyoto Protocol Clean Development Mechanism (‘CDM’) allows developed countries to invest in developing country projects, to effect both greenhouse gas emission reductions and sustainable development, in exchange for carbon credits. This study considers how Brazilian CDM projects currently promote or inhibit sustainable development in Brazil. Brazil originally proposed the CDM-type framework, led the developing countries in the multilateral negotiations, and now ranks third globally for CDM project investment. The critical legal geography literature and corresponding hybrid analytical framework is applied to analyse the overlapping and multi-layered legal space of CDM projects in the context of an uneven physical and human geography. It applies legal and qualitative social research methods including textual analysis of English and Portuguese-language documents, onsite visits, semi-structured and unstructured interviews, focus groups and case studies of twelve Brazilian CDM projects of varying project types to consider: • The environmental policymaking processes underlying Brazil’s position in the international climate negotiations and how that position impacts Brazil’s assessment of proposed CDM projects’ sustainable development benefits; • The role of the Brazilian Proposal from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol negotiations in Brazil’s ongoing assessment of proposed CDM projects; • Brazil’s enunciated sustainable development criteria for CDM projects against the criteria actually applied; • The role of state environmental licensing authorities and nonstate actors in defining appropriate sustainable development benefits for CDM projects; and • The resulting (neo-)regulatory framework for Brazilian CDM projects’ sustainable development benefits in the context of legal pluralism. This dissertation concludes that Brazil’s CDM-specific domestic regulation is driven by the negotiating positions Brazil has taken in the international climate negotiations, most notably the 1997 Brazilian Proposal. As a result, Brazilian government-based CDM-specific regulation only considers the CDM projects’ Greenhouse Gas emission reductions benefits. Brazilian approval of domestic CDM projects also entails confirmation of administrative compliance with certain non-CDM specific regulatory frameworks, but institutional capacity issues within state and local regulatory agencies tend to undermine the effectiveness of assessing administrative compliance rather than legal and regulatory compliance. This government based regulatory framework is augmented by non-state actors, who have a neo-regulatory impact on corporate activity through demands for sustainable development benefits, giving rise to corporate sustainability programmes. There is scope for this neo-regulatory impact to extend to addressing sustainable development issues more broadly through NGO engagement with local and state environmental licensing authorities in the determination of appropriate environmental licensing conditions. In each case, the achievement of substantial sustainable development benefits is impeded by the lack of a mature multi-stakeholder dialogue involving a local government and civil society. As a result, corporate actors dominate consideration of appropriate sustainable development benefits.

Many patent law dilemmas arise from a failure to understand technologies as embedded in broader social, economic and political realities and to contextually analyze these legal phenomena. This narrowness leads to poor legal development, of which the modern medical exception from patentability is one example. Judges have difficulty interpreting it, patentees do not understand its purpose and it does not protect the important medical technologies to which the public would like access. This thesis applies a legal pluralist analysis to examine the emergence of the medical methods exception in order to understand why it was created and legislated. It starts by examining the origins of the exception in the caselaw, and the informal, concurrent norm established by the emerging medical profession in the early 20th century. It then proceeds to examine why the medical profession might have sought and enforced a norm prohibiting its members from patenting, and concludes that this arose from the need of the medical profession to distance itself from the patent law. As a result, professionalizing physicians established an internal normative order that mimicked and in many cases replaced the effect of the formal law. The thesis then proceeds to examine how the form of the informal norm evolved in the period between WWI and WWII, finding that the profession’s norm transformed and broke down concurrently with its efforts to achieve external legitimacy through legislation. That breakdown arose from factors which included growing labour mobility, greater understanding of the benefits of patents, and a growing role of science and industry in medicine that threatened the profession’s access to valuable medical innovation. The thesis concludes with a study of a current case (Myriad Genetics) that applies the thesis’ theoretical framework to a present dispute over the role the law should play in regulating genetic diagnostic tests.