Legal Theory Workshop: Leif Wenar

LEGAL THEORY WORKSHOP

presents

Leif Wenar
School of Law, King’s College London

Clean Trade in Natural Resources

12:30 – 2:00
Friday, April 1, 2011

Dining Room, Flavelle House
78 Queen’s Park 

The resource curse afflicts many countries that export valuable natural resources like oil, gas and diamonds. Such countries are more prone to authoritarian governments, civil conflict and economic dysfunction. This paper argues that the resource curse is exacerbated by a failure to respect the property rights of each country’s people in its natural resources. This right is a foundational principle of the modern state system. Yet importing states violate this right when they grant to authoritarians and armed groups the legal authority sell off a territory’s resources in circumstances where citizens could not possibly check those sales. States and firms that buy resources from violent or severely repressive actors in exporting countries are therefore receiving stolen goods, and passing these stolen goods on to consumers. A policy framework for importing states is set out that is aligned with existing international obligations, and which will reform the trade policies that today drive the resource curse.

Leif Wenar is the Chair of Ethics, School of Law, King's College London. He has degrees from Stanford and Harvard, and is spending the 2010-11 academic year visiting at the Stanford Center on Ethics in Society and the Princeton Department of Politics. 

A light lunch will be provided. 

For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.