Jedidiah Kroncke on Sino-American (De)Coupling: Economic Integration Through De-Democratizing Work (CJTL)

"Sino-American (De)Coupling: Economic Integration Through De-Democratizing Work"
Jedidiah Kroncke
Columbia Journal of Transnational Law
Published online: June 2025

Abstract: The concept of “decoupling” has quickly taken center stage in American and Chinese politics. Far beyond issues of international trade, the term has become a mutual domestic focal point for legitimizing new industrial and technology policy regimes. This rapid change has reversed the basic terms of the post-1978 U.S.-China relationship—turning each nation away from an aggressive embrace of economic globalization and towards an equally aggressive embrace of economic nationalism. Leaders in both countries now highlight the other as possessing polar opposite values, framing regulatory reform as demanded by these divergent values and as part of an existential international struggle.

Yet little attention has been given to how countries, now cast as antagonists with divergent values, came to have the most deeply intertwined major economies on the planet. While the sources of modern Sino-American economic intimacy are diverse, this Article focuses on how a convergence in assumptions regarding the ademocratic nature of the workplace powerfully facilitated this engagement. In tandem, isomorphic changes in U.S. and Chinese workplace regulation placed increasing emphasis on regulating employment contracts while minimizing any form of collective bargaining in favor of authoritarian notions of corporate governance. These distinct but parallel trajectories of workplace de- democratization manifested in another telling, if surprising, modern convergence: the promotion of employee ownership. On both sides of the Pacific, the ideal of employee ownership was advanced as a means of soothing the displacement of each country’s tradition of economic citizenship. Employee participation through share ownership never materialized as a significant aspect of either economy during this time, though it repeatedly found, and still finds, great rhetorical resonance in otherwise opposed political systems. Tellingly, the employee-ownership instruments that did develop were undermined by a strikingly similar set of legal techniques preventing employee-owners from contributing to more democratic workplaces.

Ultimately, this mutual process of de-democratization points to an implication current decoupling rhetoric actively avoids: that fundamental differences in formal political organization appear to have strikingly minimal impact on their citizens’ lived experiences of work and economic citizenship. This politically inconvenient commonality is critical for both necessary for understanding how this historical process of economic integration occurred and why coercive state power drives decoupling—rather than emerging as a private product of divergent values. Thus, while the future of U.S.-China relations is both consequential and uncertain, the rush to reframe the relationship must address unsettling questions underlying the two countries’ modern history of economic integration.

Benjamin Chen on The Expressiveness of Regulatory Trade-Offs (Georgia Law Review)

"The Expressiveness of Regulatory Trade-Offs"
Benjamin Chen

Georgia Law Review, Volume 55, Issue 3

Published online on 4 May 2021

Abstract: Trade-offs between a sacred value—like human life—against a secular one—like money—are considered taboo. People are supposed to be offended by such trade-offs and to punish those who contemplate them. Yet the last decades in the United States have witnessed the rise of the cost-benefit state. Most major rules promulgated today undergo a regulatory impact analysis, and agencies monetize risks as grave as those to human life and values as abstract as human dignity. Prominent academics and lawmakers advocate the weighing of costs and benefits as an element of rational regulation. The cost-benefit revolution is a technocratic coup, however, if citizens view regulatory trade-offs as a symbolic denial of the values they hold dear.

     This Article details three experiments that evaluate responses to a cost-benefit justification for regulatory policy. Across a range of conditions, the experiments revealed no evidence of diffuse hostility toward a consequentialist approach to saving lives. The final experiment found, however, that informing participants that they were expected to vindicate the sanctity of life resulted in them doing so. This result demonstrates the malleability of norms and expectations surrounding regulatory trade-offs.

       Taken together, the experiments suggest that people normally do not perceive regulatory trade-offs as symbolic affronts that call for an expressive defense of the value of life. While these results do not conclusively establish the normative desirability of the cost-benefit paradigm, they do suggest the absence of any broad opposition to consequentialism in public life. These findings have implications for the democratic legitimacy of the administrative state and its institutional design. They also bear on the relationship between tort and regulation as mechanisms for risk control. Insofar as tort judgments are expressive and regulatory decisions are not, regulation that preempts the common law of torts might help temper the tangible costs of symbolism.

David Law Interviewed on US-HK Relations (HKEJ)

Professor David Law, Sir YK Pao Professor of Public Law, was recently interviewed by the Hong Kong Economic Journal on United States-Hong Kong relations. The interview focused on the Hong Kong Policy Act, whether and how it might be amended, and more generally how Congress can influence US policy/treatment towards Hong Kong. In the interview, Law drew an analogy to the Taiwan Relations Act and discussed how the separation of powers system in the US gives Congress various options for influencing government policy short of amending legislation (e.g., influencing the State Department through the budget process).  To read the interview in Chinese, click here.

Amanda Whitfort on Animal Welfare Law, Policy and the Threat of “Ag-gag” (Food Ethics)

"Animal Welfare Law, Policy and the Threat of “Ag-gag”: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back"

Amanda Whitfort

Food Ethics

First Online: 2 May 2019, 14 pp

Abstract: As has been the case in Europe, increasing consumer demand for higher welfare products has resulted in improved conditions for farm animals raised for slaughter in the USA and Australia. Consumer awareness has been significantly aided by investigations of farm and slaughterhouse conditions by animal welfare organizations, often working undercover. These gains are now under very serious threat. In eleven states in the USA, and three in Australia, new legislation, coined “Ag-gag” law, has been enacted prohibiting public dissemination of material depicting on farm animal use. In both countries, media corporations and private citizens are liable to up to three years’ imprisonment for publishing photographs or recordings depicting the conditions of animals on farms or at slaughter. Controls on the publication of information documenting animal use compromises transparency in the food chain, erodes the accountability of those involved in the management of animals and undermines the case for enhanced legislation and policy reform. This paper describes recent legal challenges in the USA to the constitutionality of “Ag-gag” laws and evaluates “Ag-gag” laws’ impact on animal welfare in agricultural facilities in the USA and Australia.