Transnational Business Regulation

This book examines how domestic laws project influence beyond national borders, analyzing why certain regulations and enforcement agencies achieve disproportionate global reach, reshaping foreign legal frameworks and compelling international corporate compliance.

Departing from traditional international law’s focus on abstract jurisdictional principles, this book examines extraterritoriality through concrete regulatory regimes, particularly the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These regimes exemplify transnational business regulation as a hybrid legal framework, combining administrative and criminal law tools to transcend national boundaries. The text also brings a Global South perspective, grounded in Brazil’s firsthand experience with the extraterritorial application of U.S. and European laws. Through comparative case studies of high-profile enforcement actions in Brazil, the book reveals how powerful jurisdictions can reshape legal orders in the Global South, and how the ideal of equitable sovereignty and multilateral solutions under international law has been increasingly challenged by extraterritorial regulatory practices.

This book will be of interest to academics and researchers working in the areas of business law, international law, transnational law, and the sociology of law.