Guest Blogger: Rachel J. Anderson

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Rachel J. Anderson (right) as today's guest blogger.
Associate Professor of Law at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Rachel teaches business organizations, human rights, and international business transactions. Her research interests lie at the intersection of those subjects (publications list here), and her current scholarship, as is evident in her guest post below, focuses on law and global corporate citizenship.
A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, Rachel served as Articles Editor on the California Law Review, Executive Editor on the Berkeley Journal of International Law, and Managing Editor of the review now known as the Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy, on whose National Advisory Board she continues to serve. She received an Olin Law and Economics Fellowship and a Justice Ira F. Thomson Fellowship.
Before entering academia Rachel, a member of the New York bar, was an an associate in the London office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; before law school, she worked in Berlin, for a subsidiary of the German utility Mannheimer Verkehrs- und Versorgungs AG, and consulted on European technical assistance projects respecting Russia and Eastern Europe. Rachel holds an M.A. degree in international policy studies from Stanford University and a Zwischenprüfung from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Her professional associations include the American Society of International Law, the Las Vegas Chapter of the National Bar Association, and the Society of American Law Teachers.
For reasons she details in a further guest post below, Rachel dedicates her IntLawGrrls contribution to Mary Church Terrell, the peace and rights activist who joins other foremothers in the list just below our "visiting from..." map at right.
Heartfelt welcome!

Global corporate citizens & foreign investment

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for inviting me, guest blogger, to contribute the foremother dedication below, as well as this post about my forthcoming article forthcoming in the Michigan State Journal of International Law, Toward Global Corporate Citizenship: Reframing Foreign Direct Investment Law)

Globalization in the form of foreign direct investment has not lived up to its promise to promote prosperity around the world. Many of the anticipated benefits to developing countries and their citizens have yet to materialize. True, laws promoting foreign direct investment contribute to technology transfer, increased tax revenues, and other economic benefits. However, existing laws are lax, one-sided, or limited in scope. They allow transnational corporations to cause harms like property damage, personal injury, and significant environmental damage. Insufficient protections and limited avenues for redress encourage transnational corporations to chase profits with limited concern for consequences.
In my forthcoming article, I argue that modern foreign direct investment law is a vestige of the colonial era during which early forms of transnational corporations emerged. Unlike international trade law and despite the dramatic developments of the twentieth century, foreign direct investment law remains largely unchanged. Due to a lack of political will, prior multilateral efforts to implement comprehensive foreign direct investment law reforms have been largely unsuccessful. However, in recent years, growing political will has emerged under the umbrella of Global Corporate Citizenship and related movements. In this article, I posit that Global Corporate Citizenship is an opportunity to reframe and reform foreign direct investment law.
This paper is part of a larger project on law and Global Corporate Citizenship, in which I analyze ways to reform the regulation of transnational corporations. In this series of articles, I identify gaps in the international and domestic regulation of transnational corporations, explore reasons for these gaps, set out a Global Corporate Citizenship framework for more comprehensive regulation, and develop proposals for the implementation of this framework.

Mary Church Terrell, transnational foremother

As today's guest blogger at IntLawGrrls, I would like to dedicate my contribution to Mary Church Terrell (left).
Born on September 23, 1863, in Memphis, Tennessee, Terrell was a women’s rights activist, peace activist, and civil rights leader:

► In the United States she became known, among other things, for her activism and leadership in the suffrage and desegregation movements. She was the 1st president of the National Federation of Colored Women and a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (photo credit)

► Internationally, Mary Church Terrell became known around the world for raising awareness through her speeches about the situation and achievements of African Americans. She was the vice president of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, as well as a member of the American delegation to and a speaker at the International Congresses of Women in Berlin, German,y in 1904 and 1919. Mary Church Terrell was also chosen by the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom as a speaker at the 1919 Quinquennial International Peace Conference in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1937, she delivered an address before the International Assembly of the World Fellowship of Faith in London, England.

Terrell was the author of numerous articles and short stories on segregation and the disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States and, in 1940, she wrote her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World.

She worked consistently for a better future for all. As she said in a speech before the National American Women's Suffrage Association on February 18, 1898:

With courage, born of success achieved in the past, with a keen sense of the responsibility which we shall continue to assume, we look forward to a future large with promise and hope.

Terrell died at age 90, at her home in Maryland, on July 24, 1954 -- 2 months after the U.S. Supreme Court held racial segregation of schoolchildren unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.