Elizabeth Acorn
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Book Project

I am currently working on a book manuscript titled International Law and the Diffusion of Regulatory Capitalism: The Implementation of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. The manuscript starts with the 1997 OECD Anti-Bribery Convention and the voluntary undertaking by the world’s wealthiest states to prohibit bribery in international business. The core of the manuscript examines the evolution of international anti-bribery law, long past signing ceremonies and national ratification. It looks to the 20 years since the entry into force of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention in leading OECD states to trace national interpretations, applications, and re-interpretations of the Convention’s seemingly straightforward obligation to criminally prohibit bribery in international business.

I propose a novel theory on the making and re-making of international law that shows how the hard law obligation of international law can be augmented by national policy feedback, cross-national diffusion and international monitoring. Specifically, I argue that initial divergences in how states implemented the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention are giving way to a growing policy convergence. Today, leading OECD states share not only similar formal prohibitions against foreign bribery, but also similar enforcement strategies, resolution mechanisms, and goals in governing corporate wrongdoing through criminal law. These findings demonstrate both the significant impact of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention on national policy and the diffuse and unanticipated nature of international law's influence.

Papers and presentations

My research has been published by the OECD in "The Power of Procurement in the Fight Against Foreign Bribery,” and in my paper “Twenty Years of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention: National Implementation and Hybridization," UBC Law Review 51(3) (2018) .

I have also written a shorter piece on Canada's anti-foreign bribery laws and book reviews of Interdisciplinary Perspectives on International Law and International Relations, Private Standards and Global Governance, and Rethinking Private Authority: Agents and Entrepreneurs. 
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I am an active participant in both political science and law conferences and have presented papers at the American Political Science Association Annual Conference (2016, 2017, 2019), the American Society for International Law Research Forum (2017, 2018), the Canadian Political Science Association Conference (2017), the International Society for Public Law Annual Conference (2017), the Socio-Legal Association Annual Conference (2015), and the Law and Society Association Annual Conference (2015, 2018, 2019).  
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