Kathleen Claussen is a Professor of Law at Georgetown Law. This post is based on her recent article forthcoming in the Harvard International Law Journal.
A novel form of corporate regulation is on the rise. The “trade police,” as my article calls them, are the front-line bureaucrats who enforce the laws surrounding cross-border business. Their efforts determine whether billions of dollars of goods and services enter or exit the United States, and, in the last five years, lawmakers have overhauled their functions dramatically. The new trade policing regime is a corporate accountability system unlike its predecessor government-to-government regime for which the World Trade Organization served as the core. Private actors are increasingly under the microscope of a broad swath of innovative deployments of government action: detainment of goods, financial penalties, export constraints, extensive reporting requirements, and import bans.
