New Spring undergraduate course to examine private regulation and public policy

Has GoodWeave successfully eliminated child labor from the carpet industry? How well do the Forest Stewardship Council and the Marine Stewardship Council work to preserve the forest and marine stock?

Join Andrea Renda, the 2015-2016 George C. Lamb, Jr. Regulatory Fellow, to answer these questions and more in a new, one-time course that will take a global perspective on the ways private regulation and public policy interact.

Private regulation is emerging as a prominent form of rule-making at the global level. Firms engage in private regulation to manage common pool resources and global value chains, and to establish common, market-wide standards. These rules often have a greater market and societal impact than government regulation. However, they can also hide predominant private interests. At the intersection between law, economics and business strategy, the course analyzes the conditions private regulation must meet to be aligned with the public interest. Policy implications include the treatment of self- and co-regulatory schemes in regulatory impact analysis. This course will enable students to learn from the theoretical literature around private regulation while exploring practical implications through case studies of certification bodies like GlobalGAP and Utz, multinational corporations like Microsoft and Google, and non-profit organizations like ICANN.

Renda is a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), where he started and currently manages the CEPS Regulatory Affairs Programme. He also serves as Adjunct Professor at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome, and has been a consultant for institutions including the European Commission, the European Parliament, the OECD and the World Bank.

ETHICS 390S-04: Private Regulation and Public Policy
MW 1:25PM – 2:40PM