Melbourne Law School - Research Publications

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    Meta-regulation: legal accountability for corporate social responsibility
    Parker, C (Routledge, 2017-01-01)
    The chapter argues that legal accountability for corporate social responsibility (CSR) must be aimed at making business enterprises put themselves through a CSR process aimed at CSR outcomes. It sets out what meta-regulating law must do and be in order to hold companies accountable for their responsibility. The chapter briefly explains how this notion of meta-regulating law relates to the plurality of legal, non-legal and quasi-legal ‘governance’ mechanisms at work in a globalising, post-regulatory’ world. It also sets out the critique that law which attempts to meta-regulate corporate responsibility will focus on internal governance processes in a way that allows business to avoid the conflict between self-interest and social values, and therefore to avoid accountability. Meta-regulatory law is a response to the recognition that law itself is regulated by non-legal regulation, and should therefore seek to adapt itself to plural forms of regulation.
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    Consumer Choice as a Pathway to Food Diversity: A Case Study of Açaí Berry Product Labelling
    Johnson, H ; Parker, C ; Maguire, R ; Isoni, A ; Troisi, M ; Pierri, M (Springer International Publishing, 2018)
    Forest lands and the rich social and ecological diversity contained within are being lost as demand for agriculture land expands globally. During this process traditional cultivation practices are marginalised resulting in a loss of dietary diversity. As Vira et al. observe 'Despite the huge potential of forest and tree foods to contribute to diets, knowledge on many forest foods, especially wild foods, is rapidly being lost because of social change and modernisation' . Forest loss coupled with the associ­ated declines in dietary diversity and traditional knowledge are a threat to the human right to food. This right requires diverse food production systems that are sustain­able, support livelihoods (especially those who are most marginalised) and meet nutritional needs. This chapter explores the exporting and labelling of a traditional food source the "acai berry" and examines whether the production and sale of acai has the potential to improve food diversity.
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    Lawyers as Whistleblowers: The Need for a Gatekeeper of Justice Whistleblowing Obligation/Exception
    Le Mire, S ; Parker, C ; Levy, R ; O'Brien, M ; Rice, S ; Ridge, P ; Thornton, M (ANU Press, 2017)
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    Lawyers, Confidentiality and Whistleblowing: Lessons from the McCabe Tobacco Litigation
    Parker, C ; Le Mire, S ; Mackay, A (Melbourne University, Law Review Association, 2017)
    In 2006, Christopher Dale leaked information about Clayton Utz’s internal investigation into the events surrounding the destruction of documents that would have been relevant and damaging to their client, British American Tobacco, in the 2002 McCabe litigation. This article uses this case study to examine whether lawyers can and should act as whistleblowers against colleagues and clients who abuse the administration of justice. We argue that although lawyers must have strong obligations of confidentiality to clients and others, their role as gatekeepers of justice also demands that they be allowed to blow the whistle when they have information about clients or other lawyers using legal services to subvert the administration of justice, and be protected when they do so. The article evaluates the circumstances in which such whistleblowing is appropriate and makes suggestions about how the law should be reformed by reference to three touchstones: the nature of the relationship between the lawyer and the wrongdoer; the nature of the wrongdoing itself; and, the process used to disclose the wrongdoing.
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    Compliance: 14 Questions
    Parker, C ; Nielsen, VL ; Drahos, P (ANU Press, 2017)
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    Moving towards Ecological Regulation: The Role of Criminalisation
    Haines, F ; Parker, C ; Holley, C ; Shearing, C (Routledge - Taylor & Francis, 2017)
    Contemporary society faces multiple and interacting environmental challenges that require transformational change in the conduct of business. We take one of these challenges, the need to combat anthropogenic climate change, to interrogate what is required in transforming business regulation towards what we term ‘ecological regulation’. This transition requires us to grapple with how business regulation is currently framed and how change will effect such regulation. Regulation is largely premised both on the benefits of economic competition and for the control of particular harms to take place in an discrete case-by-case manner. Current moral and legal strategies used by activists in attempting to engender a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by business interact with current forms of regulation in distinct ways. The former involves activists staking a moral case for criminalisation of ecological damage through naming and shaming strategies. This may shift the moral boundaries of acceptable business behaviour. The latter is achieved by ‘bracing’ greenhouse gas reduction with existing business regulation that can bring some legal accountability to bear. We show how these strategies begin to reframe regulatory regimes as well as what ecological regulation might look like if full legal authority in enshrining a respect for ecological limits were added the contemporary framing of business regulation.
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    An Ecological Approach to Regulatory Studies?
    Parker, C ; Haines, F (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2018)
    Regulatory studies has been mainly occupied with addressing the social and economic crises of contemporary capitalism through instrumentally and responsively rational approaches. This article asks how regulatory scholarship can better respond to the ecological crisis now facing our world and our governance systems alongside social and economic crises. There are both possibilities and problems with instrumentally rational regulatory approaches that see human ecological impact as an externality or market failure and socio-legal approaches to regulatory studies that emphasize the need to attend to the social and political aspects of regulation using a responsively rational approach. A third big shift towards an ecologically rational approach to regulatory studies is needed to comprehend our embeddedness within ecological systems. An ecologically rational approach also calls for an understanding of how multiple, diverse ways of sustainable being can intersect with and challenge current regulatory regimes dominated by an instrumentally rational approach.
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    Can Ethical Labelling Make Food Systems Healthy, Sustainable, and Just?
    Parker, C ( 2019)
    Consumers are often encouraged to “vote with their fork” and “say no” to unhealthy, unsustainable and unfair food. Food packaging is typically littered with claims about the nutrition, ethics and social goods associated with the product inside. Claims like “organic”, “GMO free”, “fair trade”, and “anti-biotic free” are common. But can consumer preference base labelling make a difference to the health, sustainability and ethics challenges facing the food system?
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    Consumer Power to Change the Food System? A Critical Reading of Food Labels as Governance Spaces: The Case of Agai Berry Superfoods
    Parker, C ; Johnson, H ; Curll, J (University of Arkansas, School of Law, 2019)
    This article argues that the marketing claims on food labels are a governance space worthy of critical examination. We use a case study of superfood agai berry products to illustrate how marketing claims on food labels encapsulate dominant neoliberal constructions of global food systems. These marketing claims implicitly promise that by making careful choices consumers can resist and redress the ravages of unbridled global capitalism.