Adelle Blackett

Mentoring the other: Cultural pluralist approaches to access to justice

The central concern of this paper is to understand the potential that informal institutions, like mentorship, hold to promote diversity in the legal profession, including academe. The paper starts from the premise that it is necessary to look at the ways in which informal institutions may simultaneously be sites that reproduce exclusionary practices and affirming spaces to promote inclusion. The paper will first critique some of the contemporary literature that focuses on the importance of role models to the project of diversifying law schools, and in the process explain why it is distinct from mentoring. It will pause to explore the assumptions about representation and access contained within this literature. The paper will then look at the characteristics of mentoring, and render explicit some of its prerequisites. The dearth of scholarship on this topic, contrasted with the implicit understanding that most successful academics have of the importance of solid mentoring relationships, will be drawn upon as a starting point to explore the informal aspects of this relationship. Feminist scholarship on another informal institution, the family, that challenges the border between the public and the private, will be called upon to work through the relational dimensions of mentoring. The third section of the paper will draw upon the scholarship on cultural pluralism and critical race theory, which seeks to look more directly at the link between identity and access to justice. It will assess to what extent mentoring can sustain difference, and whether it can consciously be drawn upon to promote it. Finally, the paper will consider whether those who see mentoring as a method to promote access to justice should embrace traditional, informal mechanisms, or whether they should prefer formal mentorship programmes.

Trade Liberalization, Labour Law, and Development: A Contextualization

This literature review emphasizes institutional analyses of trade law, while engaging some of the development literature. It focuses in some senses on what the mainstream literature may be seen to neglect, but in doing so considers that from a legal/institutional perspective one appreciates that the relationship between trade liberalization and labour law is constructed, shaped, redirected by state action. It is not the autonomous market, but rather economic activity embedded in social institutions, institutions which were constructed with a hermetic vision of the scope for national public policy in industrialized market economies of the North. Not only must the development of trade law be appreciated within its historical context to understand its intimate relationship with labour regulation in the North and labour commodification in the South. The contemporary challenges to labour regulation in low income settings of the South are also ripe for a less deterministic analysis of the impact of trade regulation once contemporary regulatory action is considered broadly, and across governance levels. It is argued that the relationship between trade liberalization and labour law must be understood as constantly reconstructed across governance levels and with a view to forms of distributive justice beyond national borders.

Research handbook on transnational labour law

The specially commissioned chapters in the Handbook explore the emergence of transnational labour law as a field, along with its contested contours. The expansion of traditional legal methods, such as treaties, is juxtaposed with the proliferation of contemporary alternatives such as indicators, framework agreements and consumer-led initiatives. Key international and regional institutions are studied for their coverage of such classic topics as freedom of association, equality, and sectoral labour standard-setting, as well as for the space they provide for dialogue. The volume underscores transnational labour laws capacity to build bridges, including on migration, climate change and development.