3CL Webinar: 'Governing the Digital Transformation of International Trade: The Legitimacy of Standard-Setting Initiatives'

Speaker:Professor Miriam Goldby (Queen Mary, University of London)

Historically the authority and power to make rules governing the behaviour of private entities lay with the state. Since 1945 states have created a vast array of intergovernmental organisations through which to act in concert when making these rules, while any self-governance within the private sphere occurred through the development of social norms enforced through moral suasion. The state’s monopoly on legitimate governance began to break down with globalisation, one of the features of which was an increased ability of private entities to exercise authority in establishing standards that perform a governance function. The question of how the rules that govern cross-border relations and phenomena come to be established is one which first started to be examined in earnest in the 1970s as the new global order emerged and with it the acknowledgement that authority no longer vested exclusively in nation-states but was shared among different actors. Understanding who is setting the standards that govern the emerging digital transformation of cross-border trade, and in accordance with what processes, is key to establishing the legitimacy of those standards. This talk will explore this dynamic, analysing digital transformation efforts through the lens of transnational governance theories.

Dr Miriam Goldby is Professor of Shipping, Insurance and Commercial Law at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London. She is the Centre’s Research Director, Director of its Insurance, Shipping and Aviation Law Institute and of its LLM in International Shipping Law. She is a member of the Comité Maritime International (CMI) Standing Committee on Carriage of Goods, and vice-chair of the International Chamber of Commerce UK (ICC UK) Commercial Law and Practice Committee. She is the author of Electronic Documents in Maritime Trade: Law and Practice (OUP), the second edition of which was published in 2019, and has published extensively in the fields of shipping, insurance and financial law. She has received research funding from the British Academy, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Lloyd’s of London and has contributed to research undertaken by the Bank of England on InsurTech and the Law Commission on Anti-Money Laundering. She is a member of the Centre for Maritime Law at the National University of Singapore and joined the centre as a visiting senior research fellow in 2019. She is on a part-time secondment to the Law Commission of England and Wales to work on the Commission’s Electronic Trade Documents project between November 2020 and January 2022.

This event is in-person, so numbers are limited. Please register to attend.

3CL runs the 3CL Travers Smith Lunchtime Seminar Series, featuring leading academics from the Faculty, and high-profile practitioners.

Enquiries to: 3cl@law.cam.ac.uk