Compliance and Compromise

Chen (international studies, George Mason U.) investigates the compliance of national legal systems with international labor standards on gender pay equity (the core International Labour Organization's Convention No. 100 on Equal Renumeration) through the application of the transnational legal process theory of Harold Koh, who has described it as defining "the process whereby an international law rule is interpreted through the interaction of transnational actors in a variety of law-declaring fora, then internalized into a nation's domestic legal system," with the process comprised of the internalization of the international norm into domestic normative systems, the interpretation of an applicable global norm, and the interaction of transnational actors. The argument is pursued through analysis of how domestic legislative systems have internalized principles of gender pay equity following ratification of the Convention, the interpretation of the Convention by domestic judiciaries, the interaction of relevant institutions dealing with the principle of gender pay equity, and comparative analysis of the wildly divergent records of compliance in Canada and Japan. Martinus Nijhoff is an imprint of Brill. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Cher Weixia Chen is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at New Century College, George Mason University. She has published in the areas of international law and comparative law on issues such as capital punishment and cultural defense.