The CLPE is financially funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the Ontario Innovation Trust. In addition, it receives maintenance support from Osgoode Hall Law School and an in-kind contribution from International Business Machines (IBM). Its purpose is two-fold. One is the establishment of the CLPE Research Paper Series, to be published on the CLPE website as well as to be distributed via the SSRN email service for a newly created CLPE Research Paper Series. This series will be Osgoode Hall’s first SSRN series and will give the Law School but also the participating other four faculties at York University a premium exposure. The SSRN publication website averages at 180.000 monthly downloads. The other purpose of the CLPE Research Network is the organization of annual, possibly bi-annual international conferences on interdisciplinary issues in the field of law and political economy. It is hoped that the impulse and the organizational efforts for the CLPE conferences will come out of the respective faculty mostly involved in the conference topic and organization. The inaugural CLPE conference will be held at Osgoode Hall Law School in October 2005 and will convene under the topic: ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ of Comparative Corporate Governance: Resetting the Interdisciplinary Agenda? The conference proceedings will be published in the CLPE Research Paper series as well as the inaugural volume of a new series “International Studies in Comparative Law and Political Economy”, edited by the CLPE at Osgoode Hall Law School. Another conference envisaged for 2005 is dedicated to current challenges in Legal Education and will bring together scholars and law teachers mainly from Canada and from Germany.

1. The funding received will go into the creation of the website that will provide a cutting edge research platform and information portal with downloadable and printable PDF versions of published papers as well as through a print-on-demand facility. The received funding does not provide for organizational costs for conferences or for research materials (books, subscriptions). The missing funds will have to be raised through other grants and stipends.

2. The Editorial Board consists of member of faculty of altogether five York University departments, Osgoode Hall Law School, Schulich School of Business, Political Science Department, Department of History and Department of Sociology, all York University. The Advisory Board is interdisciplinary and international and its members are expected to contribute to the Network by suggesting and submitting publishable research papers from themselves, colleagues or supervised graduate students. It is desirable that every board member participates in the editorial process of at least two papers per year. In addition, members of the editorial board and of the advisory board are expected to circulate information on relevant conferences or new publications. To centralize such information efforts, all information shall be sent to a coordinator at York University (t.b.a.) who will feed the information into the CLPE website.

3. To date, there is no interdisciplinary initiative comparable to the emerging CLPE Network. Its interdisciplinarity will be both its highest aspiration as well as its certain source of occasional frustration. The CLPE Network shall provide a multitude of opportunities for border-crossing thought exchange and synergies. It shall be decided whether to establish a regular, e.g. bi-monthly or tri-monthly (=six times/four times a year) meeting of the Editorial board members to gather information on upcoming publications or conferences.

4. The CLPE website shall list all members of the Editorial board and of the Advisory Board with short biographies, departmental affiliation, an optional picture, information on selected publications and a link to the member’s personal website. As example may serve the listings on the ECGI website (http://www.ecgi.org/index.htm).

PART II: The Research Portal

The CLPE will feature the following functionalities:

• the posting of research papers, and an alert mechanism to website members to notify of such posting
• an archive/database of the research papers
• written feedback and commentary on papers
• hyper-links to profiles of papers’ authors and of those in the network of collaborators providing feedback (such profiles having at minimum affiliation and email contact details but also providing for website members to upload descriptions of their own research projects, published papers, course syllabi, and bibliographies)
• a constantly updated ‘virtual’ library/database of publications dealing with the Network’s theoretical focus on comparative law and comparative political economy, both created at York from periodic bibliographic searches and researched in outside bibliographies and reading lists as have been uploaded by site members to their sub-site within the overall site
• hyperlinks to online versions of items in the virtual library, or to full-text versions where permission has been granted for a given item
• search engines both for within the site (e.g. of the text of research papers, of all bibliographies uploaded by members to their sub-sites, etc) and linked to relevant external databases (e.g. specific library collections), with efficient and useful presentation of results and saving of desired items on the list
• online facilities for discussion fora to be created (a) by site administrators and (b) by website members themselves, including (i) asynchronous ‚conferencing’ with discussions threaded by subject and archived for viewing at the convenience of participants, (ii) real-time ‚chatting’, primarily text-based but also with web-based audio discussion potential
• online facilities that allow virtual collaboration in the sharing of research, in the writing of papers, and the editing of volumes
• tracking and posting of details about relevant conferences, symposia, and workshops around the world
• state-of-the-art web-management capabilities, and associated web interface, that allows (a) academic site administrators to update and change not only information but its location and appearance on the site, and (b) site members to create their own sub-sites that give them the same abilities as the administrators have for the main site (subject to some mandatory uniform content or features) so as to permit researchers to create customized research portals for themselves centred on the CLPE themes – all of the foregoing to be doable directly on-screen from any computer hooked up to the web, and generally making recourse to professional website administrators unnecessary
• as part of the foregoing, a main menu of modularized research services or features (research‚ modules’) that permits a simple operation by which a given service, feature or level of functionality can be selected for a site member’s research portal sub-site (e.g. a choice of methods to display or organize the research papers [which would be a sine qua non feature of every sub-site], a particular form of bibliographic software, or a particular ‚weblogging’ [blogging] software, and so on), so that, as the mainsite develops in terms of services or features, site members can develop and reconfigure their own sub-site at will (choosing some and not others, and choosing some functionalities and not others)
• the ability for the site to process a print-on-demand (POD) ‚publishing’ service for site members (and possibly casual visitors) who wish to have properly bound and covered copies of research papers or, more likely, customized clusters of research papers ordered, paid for online, printed automatically (by a CLPE POD machine), and mailed by hand once instructions are sent to a CLPE secretary to say a POD order is waiting to be sent; the associated capacity to print (upon demand) such pre-selected thematic anthologies of final research papers as the CLPE administrators decide would be attractive to certain audiences; and, further, the associated capacity for CLPE to digitize key published material and create on-demand and limited-run publications (with necessary permissions of course)
• Creation of CLPE PRESS through Print-on-demand facilities set up with the CFI funds
• a realtime webcasting function, and video and audio archives, so that those unable to attend the biennial conference can view or listen in real-time (including, to the extent desirable, making queries and interventions that can be collected and integrated into the conference) or access the archives at will at any time after the conference.
  

PART III: Theoretical Background and Motivation for an Interdisciplinary and International Research Network in Law and Political Economy

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE GOVERNANCE: THE COMPARATIVE POLITICAL ECONOMY
OF STATES AND MARKETS IN TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXT

The motivation for the creation of the CLPE Research Network directly grew out of my prior research that for some years has focused on different fields of public and private ordering, e.g. in the areas of contemporary welfare state administration, compensation funds in the context of Holocaust era litigation in the 1990s as well as commercial arbitration and new trends in public international law. The study of these fields necessarily opens up interdisciplinary perspectives and the commonly shared experiences of a lack of fruitful and productive interdisciplinary research gave rise to the conceptualization and the creation of the CLPE Research Network. While the theoretical and topical scope of the future work in and in the context of CLPE is very open and will depend tremendously on the input from its members, possible issues of common research enterprises may comprise:

• the legal status of emerging instruments and mechanisms in the so-called “Third Sector”;
• the viability of new forms of governance, privatization, the “contracting state” and “private interest government”;
• non-state actors in both domestic and transnational arenas and contexts;
• the historical and socio-economic reassessment of contemporary capitalism after Polanyi and Shonfield;
• the role of corporatism in Europe and of its absence in North-America;
• the social role of the (multinational) business corporation;
• the changing nature of national political economies in an increasingly integrated global order: the fate of industrial relations, welfare policies and vocational training;
• the prospects for securities regulation – domestic or international, public or private?
• innovation and sustainability in contemporary post-industrial societies;
• convergence and divergence in corporate governance regimes;
• transnational human rights litigation versus international institution building
• etc.