Corporate Accountability Lab brings together design thinking, human rights expertise, and hard work to fight corporate impunity.
Here are the four main program areas we work in. Click on each to learn more!
CAL’s Legal Design Lab is a space dedicated to designing and testing strategies to address to the global crisis of corporate impunity. A series of United States Supreme Court decisions over the past decade have made it increasingly difficult to hold corporations accountable for violations committed overseas. Corporations often evade accountability for abuses like forced labor, union busting, and sexual and gender-based violence, especially when harms occur transnationally. As a result, impacted workers and communities are left without justice. CAL’s Design Lab is a research and development hub where we incubate non-traditional legal strategies, build connections, conduct research, and facilitate strategic and collaborative spaces using design thinking processes and mindsets. CAL’s innovations are not meant to stay in the Lab--they are most useful when brought to the field, the factory, and the courtroom. Through projects like the Brain Trust, Idea Bank, Civil Litigation Skillshare, and Corporate Liability and Sustainable Peace (CLASP) Lab, CAL is always refining and building on our innovations, learning about other ideas, and testing what is promising in the real world.
Across the world, 25 million people are subject to forced labor in industries that range from cocoa to cotton to coffee. Additionally, an estimated 79 million children are engaged in hazardous child labor, which is one of “the worst forms of child labor.” Young children use machetes, carry heavy loads, spray pesticides, and do other dangerous tasks, all forms of hazardous child labor that children are incapable of consenting to. Child labor that requires children to work at the expense of their health, schooling, or well being must be considered forced. Forced labor and exploitative labor practices are not “errors” in supply chains. Rather, such practices are a feature of the global economy that Global North companies and consumers benefit from. Multinational companies pay unsustainably low prices for goods, thereby squeezing suppliers and leading factories and farmers to cut costs however they can, including by using illegal forms of labor. CAL aims to develop new strategies to combat the use of forced labor in global supply chains. We’ve pioneered new uses of the Tariff Act of 1930, filed a groundbreaking consumer protection case, written amicus briefs for a Supreme Court case on forced child labor, and investigated opportunities to use unfair competition rules to block goods produced with human rights abuses. We’ve also written reports on the efficacy of existing trade regimes and social auditing with partners ranging from law school clinics to Ghanaian civil society organizations.
Around the world, economic actors -- including individuals, multinationals, and others in the private sector -- are complicit in human rights and environmental abuses in conflict settings. Foreign and domestic companies, large and small, leverage conflicts so that displacement, intimidation, and land grabbing by governments and illegal armed groups align with their business interests. Yet when societies enter formal and informal transitional justice processes for both legal justice and social reckoning with the atrocities that occurred, corporate actors are often ignored. This impunity leaves impacted communities without redress, maintains abusive power structures, and undermines sustainable peace. CAL uses a human-centered approach to holding companies and other economic actors accountable, by centering victims, survivors, and affected communities in designing strategies. So far, we have facilitated civil litigation skillshares, hosted the legal design-centric Corporate Liability and Sustainable Peace (CLASP) Lab with our partners at Dejusticia, la Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz, and the African Coalition for Corporate Accountability, provided technical support to Colombia’s transitional justice mechanisms, and organized a variety of submissions to regional and international organizations with help from our colleagues.
Intellectual Property (IP) law governs the rights creators have over their creations, protecting a creator’s physical property and the ideas that brought the creation to life. Unfortunately, IP is not always used as its creators intend, especially in the tech industry, where creators’ work can be used by companies (and government partners from the US and abroad) in ways that harm people and the planet. In the past, this has been accepted as part of the traditional approach to open source projects. The Ethical Source Movement promotes a pro-social and ethical alternative, focusing on justice and equity as essential components of thriving open source communities and projects. Together, CAL and our partners at the Organization for Ethical Source have developed a number of licenses and IP assignment clauses allowing tech workers to embed human rights and environmental conditions into their licenses. The licenses give tech workers several options, ranging from a license with the broad inclusion of human rights law, to an “expanded duty of care” license model, to assignment clauses with specific restrictions around issues of interest to tech workers (prohibiting use of the IP in ICE or Pentagon contracts, for example).