Several corporate social responsibility (CSR) laws have been enacted across the world over the past decade. While the emergence, operation and impact of CSR laws have already been analysed at some length, their legal operability remains poorly understood. In this article, the authors argue that CSR laws form a novel and increasingly signi cant attempt to conceptualise and govern the new logic of production – global value chains – and its regulatory infrastructure. To this end, the authors deploy a comparative appraisal of ten recent CSR laws to probe their legally-operative conceptualisations of global value chains. By analysing how CSR laws conceptualise the value chain, the lead rm and adequate value chain governance, the authors argue that these national legislative instruments emerge as proxies for a legally-operative framework that better delineates the emerging law of global value chains and also serves as a basis for further development of CSR laws e.g. in Finland.