1st Webinar
2nd Webinar
Law, Knowledge, Power, And Global Governance: Two Webinars, One Broader Conversation
It is a great pleasure to begin sharing reflections on the first two events of the European Society of International Law (ESIL) Interest Group on European and International Rule of Law Webinar Series. Over the next several days, I will publish a series of daily posts offering more detailed reflections on each webinar and on the individual contributions of the speakers and discussants. Before turning to those conversations separately, however, I would like to begin by considering them together and identifying the unifying thread connecting their different subjects: how law organizes knowledge, authority, power, resources, responsibility, and justice, and how institutional design shapes both national and global governance.
Although the two webinars addressed very different fields, they were conceived as parts of a broader and interconnected conversation about how law organizes knowledge, authority, power, resources, responsibility, and justice, and about the role of institutional design in shaping both national and global governance and what, in my view, the Rule of Law should be.
The inaugural webinar, held on July 22, 2026, was entitled:
“Taxation, Racial Capitalism, and the International Rule of Law: From Colonial Slavery to Global Governance”
The webinar brought into dialogue two important recent books:
Anthony C. Infanti, The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America (New York University Press, 2025)
Steven A. Dean, Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow (Oxford University Press, 2025)
Carliss N. Chatman participated as discussant, bringing her scholarship on slavery, commercial law, racial justice, and corporate power into the conversation. I had the privilege of chairing and moderating the webinar and also contributing as a discussant.
The discussion examined taxation not simply as a technical system for raising public revenue, but as a form of legal and institutional ordering through which societies classify persons and property, distribute benefits and burdens, construct markets and political authority, and determine whose interests, experiences, and knowledge receive recognition.
The second webinar, held on August 12, 2026, was entitled:
“From Trademark Law to Public Health Governance: Intellectual Property, International Treaties, and the Rule of Law in a Changing Global Order”
This conversation brought together:
Shujie Feng, author of Chinese Trademark Law from the Perspective of International Treaties (Springer Nature, 2026) and Le Droit Chinois des Marques au Regard des Traités Internationaux (Éditions Pedone, 2024)
Srividhya Ragavan and Swaraj Paul Barooah, authors of Fractures in IP, Trade, and Health: Centering a Public Health Framework (Oxford University Press, 2025)
Edward Kwakwa, Assistant Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), participated as discussant. I again had the privilege of chairing and moderating the conversation and contributing as a discussant.
The second webinar explored how intellectual property law operates at the intersection of international treaties, domestic regulatory priorities, economic development, technological change, access to medicines, and public health. It also examined the difficult institutional choices that arise when formally binding legal commitments interact with competing conceptions of welfare, justice, development, and the public interest.
Taken together, the two webinars reveal important connections.
Tax law and intellectual property law may appear to occupy separate doctrinal fields. Yet both constitute legal infrastructures through which institutions allocate rights, resources, risks, opportunities, and authority. Both can reinforce existing inequalities while presenting themselves as technical or neutral systems. Both require us to examine who participates in creating legal rules, whose knowledge is treated as authoritative, whose interests remain insufficiently represented, and how institutions can be redesigned to respond more effectively to historical injustice and contemporary global challenges.
These conversations therefore extend beyond taxation or intellectual property. They engage broader questions concerning colonialism, racial capitalism, international economic law, public health, development, technology, expertise, institutional legitimacy, legal pluralism, and the changing structure of global governance.
They also form part of a wider intellectual agenda being developed through several complementary initiatives: the ESIL Interest Group on European and International Rule of Law; the International Law Association Study Group on International Law, Global Challenges, and the Impact of Emerging Powers on Global Governance; and the American Branch of the International Law Association Committee on China, Emerging Powers and Global Challenges.
Through these different initiatives, the larger objective is to create sustained spaces in which scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and international institutions can place specialized areas of law into conversation and examine the broader institutional architecture connecting them.
This is the first of a series of retrospective posts. In the coming posts, I will share more detailed reflections on each webinar and highlight the distinctive contributions of each speaker and discussant.
I am deeply grateful to Anthony C. Infanti, Steven A. Dean, Carliss N. Chatman, Shujie Feng, Srividhya Ragavan, Swaraj Paul Barooah, and Edward Kwakwa for their generosity, intellectual engagement, and willingness to participate in these conversations.
I very much look forward to continuing this shared work across disciplines, institutions, legal traditions, and international organizations.
#InternationalLaw #RuleOfLaw #GlobalGovernance #InstitutionalDesign #EpistemicGovernance #TaxLaw #RacialCapitalism #SlaveryAndLaw #IntellectualProperty #TrademarkLaw #PublicHealth #InternationalEconomicLaw #LegalHistory #GlobalJustice #ESIL #ILA #ABILA
Selected Bibliography – 1st Webinar
Books in Dialogue
Dean, Steven A. (2025). Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow. Oxford: Oxford University Press – Examines how international tax law has historically contributed to racialized structures of economic power and inequality on a global scale.
Infanti, Anthony C. (2025). The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America. New York: New York University Press – Explores the relationship between taxation, slavery, and state-building in colonial America, highlighting the human costs embedded in fiscal and legal institutions.
Related Scholarship by Steven A. Dean
Racialized International Tax Law in Research Handbook on Critical Tax Studies (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press, Yvette Lind and Dominic de Cogan, eds.)
Fear of a Black Planet: Africa’s Decolonisation and the Transformation of the International Tax Regime in Taxing People: The Next 100 Years (Cambridge University Press 2026, Tsilly Dagan and Ruth Mason, eds.)
Filing While Black: The Casual Racism of the Tax Law, 2022 Utah Law Review 801, available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4081456
Inclusive International Tax Policymaking: FATCA, the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus, and the OECD Blacklist, Revue Européenne et Internationale de Droit Fiscal(2021) (Reprinted in Tax Notes International)
Ten Truths about Tax Havens: Inclusion and the ‘Liberia’ Problem, 70 Emory Law Journal1657 (2021) (with Attiya Waris), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3822421
Dean’s SSRN Author Page https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=440250
Related Scholarship by Anthony Infanti
Our Selfish Tax Laws: Toward Tax Reform That Mirrors Our Better Selves (The MIT Press 2018).
Critical Tax Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, Anthony C. Infanti & Bridget J. Crawford eds., 2009). The Introduction is available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1333799
Internation Equity and Human Development, in Tax, Law and Development (Edward Elgar Publishing, Miranda Stewart & Yariv Brauner eds., 2013).
Tax Equity, 55 Buff. L. Rev. 1191 (2008), available at https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/buffalolawreview/vol55/iss4/5/
Tax and Time: On the Use and Misuse of Legal Imagination (NYU Press 2022), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4006652
Tax Reform Discourse, 32 Va. Tax Rev. 205 (2012), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2034869
Critical Tax Theory: Insights from the US and Opportunities for All, 51 Austl. Tax Rev. 81 (2022) (with Bridget J. Crawford), available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4236410
Infanti’s SSRN Author Page
Related Scholarship by Carliss N. Chatman
(2023). “Teaching Slavery in Commercial Law.” 28 Michigan Journal of Race & Law 1–38. SMU Dedman School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 611. Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3926671 – Examines how slavery and its enduring legacies can be more meaningfully integrated into the teaching and understanding of commercial law.
(2026). “The Contract and the Cure: Building a Private Infrastructure for Reparations.” In Slavery’s Long Tentacles: Entanglements in Historical and Modern Forms of Slavery (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). https://ssrn.com/abstract=6140369 – Explores the role of private law, contracts, and institutional design in advancing reparative justice for the enduring harms of slavery.
(October 24, 2024). “1981”, 82 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1655 (2026), SMU Dedman School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 666, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4998718 – Analyzes the continuing significance of 42 U.S.C. § 1981 and its role in addressing racial discrimination, equality, and access to economic opportunity.
(2018). “The Corporate Personhood Two-Step.” 18 Nevada Law Journal 811–862. Posted July 17, 2017; revised August 11, 2023. Chatman, Carliss, The Corporate Personhood Two-Step (June 25, 2017). 18 Nev. L. J. 811 (2018), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2992275 – Investigates how legal doctrines of corporate personhood shape corporate power, accountability, and the allocation of rights within modern governance systems.
Chatman’s SSRN Author Page https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=2419097
Related Scholarship by Paolo D. Farah
(2026). Epistemic Governance. Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6487038 – Develops a framework for understanding how knowledge, authority, expertise, and competing narratives shape governance structures, institutional legitimacy, and global ordering.
(2025) China’s Path to Modernization and Legal Pluralism: Transplants and the Belt and Road Initiative, Asian Journal of Law and Society, Cambridge University Press https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5215873 – Examines how competing legal traditions, governance models, and development paradigms contribute to evolving forms of legal pluralism and the reconfiguration of global order.
(2024). “Energy Justice, Just Transition and International Environmental Law.” In ASIL Proceedings (Just Energy Transition: Legal Challenges Associated with Coal Phase Out), Cambridge University Press. Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5055884 – Explores how legal and governance frameworks shape the distribution of benefits and burdens during energy transitions, highlighting questions of historical responsibility, distributive justice, institutional legitimacy, and the role of law in addressing structural inequalities associated with climate and energy transformation.
Farah’s SSRN Author Page https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=629289
Selected Bibliography – 2nd Webinar
Books in Dialogue
Shujie Feng, Chinese Trademark Law from the Perspective of International Treaties (Springer Nature, 2026);
Shujie Feng, Le Droit Chinois des Marques au Regard des Traités Internationaux (Éditions Pedone, 2024); and
Srividhya Ragavan and Swaraj Paul Barooah, Fractures in IP, Trade, and Health: Centering a Public Health Framework (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Related Scholarship by Shujie Feng
- Shujie FENG, The Copyrightability of AI- Generated Content: A Doctrinal Exploration of the Pioneering Chinese Judicial Practice , Computer Law & Security Review , Vol. 59 , 2025.
- Shujie FENG, Geographical Indications: Can China Reconcile the Irreconcilable Intellectual Property Issue Between E.U. and U.S.? World Trade Review , May 2019. 13.
- Shujie FENG, La mise en œuvre du droit de l’OMC en matière de propriété intellectuelle en Chine —- Etude sur le droit chinois des brevets avec une perspective française- européenne (en Français ) , Edition s A. Pédone, 2019.
- ILA 2023 Paris Conference White Paper on Intellectual Property
Related Scholarship by Srividhya Ragavan
Selected Bibliography
Books
- Intellectual Property Law and Access to Medicine: TRIPS Agreement, Health, and Pharmaceuticals, Amaka Vanni ed., Routledge Press, 2021.Chapter of particular relevance:
“World Trade Organization: A Barrier to Global Public Health?”https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003176602-3/world-trade-organization-srividhya-ragavanBook DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003176602 - Book Chapter
- “To Sow or Not to Sow: Dilemmas from Creating New Food Rights,” in Agricultural Biotechnology and Intellectual Property: Seeds of Change, Jay P. Kesan ed., CABI Publishers, 2007.https://www.cabidigitallibrary.org/doi/10.1079/9781845932015.0320
Law Review Articles
- “New Paradigms for Protection of Biodiversity.”https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=1742721
- “The Dispute Settlement Process of the WTO: A Normative Structure to Achieve Utilitarian Objectives.”https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1540&context=facscholar
- “Make America Healthy: Reducing High Pharmaceutical Prices Without Reducing Innovation,” 77 SMU Law Review 787 (2024).https://doi.org/10.25172/smulr.77.4.5
- “The Dispute Settlement Process of the WTO: A Normative Structure to Achieve Utilitarian Objectives,” with Brian Manning, 79 UMKC Law Review 1 (2010).
- “Correlative Obligation in Patent Law: The Role of Public Good in Defining the Limits of Patent Exclusivity,” 6 NYU Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law 6 (2016).
Related Scholarship by Paolo Davide Farah
Selected Bibliography
Books
- Artificial Intelligence, Governance and Sustainable Development: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, co-edited with Imad Antoine Ibrahim and Jon Truby, Routledge, 2026.https://www.routledge.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Governance-and-Sustainable-Development-Peace-Justice-and-Strong-Institutions/Ibrahim-Truby-Farah/p/book/9781032524047
- Science, Technology, Policy and International Law, co-edited with Justo Corti Varela, Routledge, 2024.https://www.routledge.com/Science-Technology-Policy-and-International-Law/Varela-Farah/p/book/9781032751139
- China’s Influence on Non-Trade Concerns in International Economic Law: Trade, Investment and Beyond, co-edited with Elena Cima, Routledge, 2016.https://www.routledge.com/Chinas-Influence-on-Non-Trade-Concerns-in-International-Economic-Law/Farah-Cima/p/book/9780367439897
- Globalization, Environmental Law, and Sustainable Development in the Global South: Challenges for Implementation, co-edited with Kirk W. Junker, Routledge, 2021.https://www.routledge.com/Globalization-Environmental-Law-and-Sustainable-Development-in-the-Global-South-Challenges-for-Implementation/Junker-Farah/p/book/9780367749262
Book Chapters and Related Contributions
- “Framing AI’s Role in Achieving SDG 16,” with Imad Antoine Ibrahim and Jon Truby, in Artificial Intelligence, Governance and Sustainable Development: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, Routledge, 2026.https://ssrn.com/abstract=5399415
- “The Intersections Among Science, Technology, Policy and Law: In Between Truth and Justice,” with Justo Corti Varela, in Science, Technology, Policy and International Law, Routledge, 2024.https://ssrn.com/abstract=4590214
- “Water-Energy-Food Nexus in International Law: A Legal Analysis,” with Imad Antoine Ibrahim, in Handbook on the Water-Energy-Food Nexus, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022, pp. 381–397.https://ssrn.com/abstract=4243774
Articles
- When John Locke Meets Lao Tzu: The Relationship between Intellectual Property, Biodiversity and Indigenous Knowledge and the Implications for Food Security, 33 Duke Envtl. L. & Pol’y F. 297 (2024).
- Conflict between Intellectual Property Rights and Human Rights: A Case Study on Intangible Cultural Heritage, 94 Or. L. Rev. 125 (2015).
- The Implementation of the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) in China, 2 Tsinghua China L. Rev. 2, 317–51 (Spring 2010).
- Desirability of Commodification of Intangible Cultural Heritage: The Unsatisfying Role of IPRs, 11 Transnat’l Dispute Mgmt. 2, 2014.
- Global Governance and Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Information Society: At the Crossroads of IPRs and Innovation, in Daniele Archibugi & Andrea Filippetti (eds.), HANDBOOK OF GLOBAL SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND INNOVATION 462–79 (Oxford: Wiley Publisher 2015).
- Public Ownership and the WTO in a Post Covid-19 Era: From Trade Disputes To a ‘Social’ Function, 125 W. Va. L. Rev. 644 (2022).
- “Energy Trade and the WTO: Implications for Renewable Energy and the OPEC Cartel,” with Elena Cima, 16 Journal of International Economic Law 707–740 (2013).https://doi.org/10.1093/jiel/jgt024
- World Trade Organization, Renewable Energy Subsidies and the Case of Feed-in Tariffs: Time for Reform Toward Sustainable Development?, 27 Geo. Envtl. L. Rev. 515 (2015).
- Trade and Progress: The Case of China, 30 Colum. J. Asian L. 51 (2016).
- “Trade in Clean Energy Technologies: Sliding from Protection to Protectionism Through Obligations for Technology Transfer in Climate Change Law, or Vice Versa?,” with Anthi Koskina-Saridaki and Imad Antoine Ibrahim, 13 Journal of World Energy Law & Business 114–128 (2020).https://ssrn.com/abstract=3646993
- “China’s Energy Policies and Strategies for Climate Change and Energy Security,” with Haifeng Deng, 13 Journal of World Energy Law & Business 141–156 (2020).https://doi.org/10.1093/jwelb/jwaa018
- “Urgenda v. Juliana: Lessons for Future Climate Change Litigation Cases,” with Imad Antoine Ibrahim, 84 University of Pittsburgh Law Review 547 (2023).https://ssrn.com/abstract=4352769
- “A Comparison Between Shale Gas in China and Unconventional Fuel Development in the United States: Water, Environment and Sustainable Development,” with Riccardo Tremolada, 41 Brooklyn Journal of International Law 579–654 (2016).https://ssrn.com/abstract=2802157
- “Balancing Technological Innovation and Regulation: Safeguarding Societal Interests in the Age of AI,” JURIST, February 25, 2025.https://ssrn.com/abstract=5156010
Paolo Davide Farah, Paolo Farah
1st Webinar
2nd Webinar