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Auditors of global supply chains play an influential role in determining what it means for manufacturing facilities to comply with both transnational standards as well as national and international labour laws. They exercise this role at the interface between the local context of labourers in a workplace governed by local and national laws, and the transnational context of private standards intended to govern global supply chains. This article utilises the concept of translocal legality to explore how auditors develop and deploy their authority and technical expertise to interpret questions about compliance with legal and private norms in global supply chains. It illustrates how auditors transform what it means to be compliant with legal requirements, and in doing so creates a distinction between acceptable and unacceptable types of risk to workers’ safety in the context of economic globalization.

This article draws on the notion of co-production to assess the construction oftransnational narratives in climate change litigation. Using the examples ofrecent cases from the Netherlands, Norway, and Ireland, the article identifies acommon narrative regarding the temporal dimension of climate change and itsgovernance. Litigants are shown to develop a notion of urgency for nationalclimate policies with the help of symbols and discourses—including pathways,crossroads, milestones, thresholds and carbon budgets—in order to attributemeaning to complex models of the future climate, and the immediateresponsibilities of states to limit future global warming. In response, states offerdepictions of the future in which technological and economic evolutionsrender our current climate crisis less challenging and costly. This narrativeapproach helps make sense of the transnational legal strategies through whichour understanding of responsibility and climate justice is unfolding.

William Twining comprehensively evaluated the challenges that a contemporary context of globalisation poses for legal scholarship in his 2009 Montesquieu Lecture at Tilburg Law School. This article connects this lecture to his previous work on American Legal Realist Karl Llewellyn in order to construct a notion of ‘global situation sense’ that might be appropriate for legal professionals who face similar challenges in the globalisation context of their work. In referring to the work of ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, Twining's globalisation context is described as a context of opportunity arising from the variety of diverse legal systems interacting. Subsequently, six characteristics of a ‘global situation sense’ are presented, providing legal professionals with a structure for engaging with global legal developments in their local practices. The notion of ‘global situation sense’ is illustrated with reference to the ‘Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh’.