Exploring the link between law and the fair trade movement: how can law be opened to reflect values from a social movement to benifit the world's poor?

Abstract

The fair trade movement has been established to create a mutual equality among people in a global pane to offset a gap of inequality and poverty exacerbated by the effect of globalization. One of the main principles of fair trade is based on the value of fairness and social solidarity to create a tie between business corporations and impoverished producers. While the livelihoods of small-scale producers depend on trading interactions with the business world, the main concern is that the nature of corporations in their profit-seeking behavior might result in abuses of resources, labor malpractices, and environment degradation in developing countries. In order to offset the danger that global business poses on the poor, the relationship between law and the fair trade movement has raised my interest in conducting this thesis so as to consider the extent that legal approaches can be argued to embrace legitimacy from emerging social norms. Legal imperatives from CSR and soft regulation will be explored to propose the weight of fair trade in shaping corporate practices to take ethical and moral commitment towards sustainability of human development. The uniqueness of the fair trade movement is to be explored in the light of legal theories concerning community and solidarity. Philosophical ideas of scholars like Selznick and Cotterrell argue for ‘bottom-up’ legitimacy grounded in community power that seeks for a responsive role of bureaucracy towards new demands in an ever-changing society. Their legal arguments have been greatly influential in a modern legal analysis on emerging concepts of regulation. The thesis is set out to propose that the fair trade movement possesses a distinctive set of social forces capable of influencing regulatory strategies and policies to render fairness and justice to the poor.