Intellectual Overview

This is an intensive, two day workshop centering around the work of Dr. John Braithwaite, inaugural Faskens Visiting Scholar, UBC Faculty of Law.  The workshop focuses on Dr. Braithwaite’s influential concept of “Responsive Regulation,” as he has developed it over the last two decades.  We are approaching the 20th anniversary of his ground-breaking book (with Ian Ayres), Responsive Regulation (1992).  Both the imminent anniversary of the book and recent events make this an opportune moment to reflect on the influence and evolution of this world-changing regulatory approach.  The design, participants, and timing of this workshop give it the potential to be a watershed event in regulatory studies. 

All of the particular subject areas covered by the conference – financial regulation, environmental regulation, and taxation policy – are hot issues.  The global financial crisis that peaked in fall 2008 laid bare the profound inadequacies in contemporary financial regulation.  The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has highlighted some alarming regulatory shortcomings in the United States.  These regulatory regimes were developed in the Responsive Regulation era, and sometimes bear a facial resemblance to that approach.  Scholars and regulators are struggling to understand the implications of those real life failures for theory and practice.  At the same time, Responsive Regulation has produced real and remarkable progress in environmental regulation, in workplace safety, and a broad range of other contexts.  Taxation policy, as well, has recently begun to embrace the Responsive Regulatory approach in the service of more equitable, responsive, and representative taxation schemes. 

This workshop is designed to be interdisciplinary (with scholars from law, history, and sociology).  It is also designed to allow for cross-pollination between subject matter areas and disciplines.  The first and last panels of the workshop will focus on broader theoretical and regulatory design concerns, with a view to linking underlying themes across the two day event, and to drawing out conceptual relationships and overarching insights.  In addition to participating scholars, to ensure that the discussion remains appropriately connected to live concerns, each subject matter panel will feature a high profile regulatory practitioner as a discussant and “voice from practice.”

Participating scholars are an international group, hailing from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Israel.  Domestic scholarship and practice is enhanced by considering other regulatory regimes that are grappling with similar issues.  Additionally, regulation, and scholarship about regulation, is increasingly global.  Regulators regularly operate at transnational and international levels.  Scholars of regulation publish in international journals and read one anothers’ work.  Challenges such as environmental and natural resource protection, or prospects for a global bank or carbon tax, span national boundaries.  

Workshop papers, along with a new paper by Dr. Braithwaite, will be published in a special edition of the UBC Law Review.