A trendy tee for 5 euros and edgy hipster pants as seen at Paris Fashion Week for 20, what a bargain! Shopping trips to fashion stores usually delight us with unbeatable deals. As consumers, we benefit from low prices, the cost of these, however, is borne elsewhere, be it by the environment affected by harmful but cheap production methods or by humans working under poor conditions for ridiculous wages. An unfair situation. In her research, our Scholar of the Month, Barbara Steininger (Centre of European Private Law), examines such global challenges and looks into the question of how the law, in particular how corporate liability at the top of the supply chain, can contribute to improving the current situation and, thus, prevent environmental damage and human rights violations that repeatedly occur in global supply chains.
As such worldwide challenges cannot be addressed from the Austrian legal perspective alone, the private law expert’s ambitious approach includes the look beyond our borders to study solutions and experiences in other countries. How do we profit from such an approach and who does Barbara Steininger cooperate with? Find out more in her sedcard. Is there an absolute legal truth, what facilitates a change in perspective and what makes legal tasks so exciting? Our Scholar of the Month shares her thoughts in the short video portrait below.