Evil Corporations: Law, Culpability and Regulation

This book elaborates and interrogates the idea of evil corporations from a diverse range of disciplines.

There has long been awareness of systemic harms inflicted by corporations, but this awareness has rarely led to any effective legal means to prevent and/or respond adequately to them. Lawyers and legal theorists appear to be stuck asking the same questions, and giving the same ineffective answers. Part of the problem, this book maintains, is the relative lack of theoretical interrogation into the nature of corporations as responsible, moral agents. To break this stasis, this book draws upon philosophies of wickedness in order to ask whether or not corporations are, or can be, evil. With contributions from a range of different disciplines, including law, cultural theory, theology, and philosophy, it offers a novel account of how and why corporate wrongs are caused, whilst exploring the extent to which the legal system itself facilitates such wrongdoing.

The book is targeted at a broad international audience with research interests in corporate crime. This will be of particular interest to those within the legal discipline including corporate law, criminal law, corporate crime and law and humanities scholars.

table of content

Introduction

Penny Crofts

 

Part 1: Doomed to be Evil?

Chapter 1 Can capitalism ever be other than evil?

James Martel

Chapter 2 Can a corporation be evil?

Luke Russell

Chapter 3 Corporate Vice

Stephanie Collins

 

Part 2: Corporate Harms

Chapter 4 Ecocide, Evil and the Corporation

Joanna Kyriakakis

Chapter 5 Prescription Medicine, Adverse Effects and Economies of Death

Marc Trabsky and Jacinthe Flore

Chapter 6 The Corporate Evil of Unsafe Products: Strict liability, negligence and the expressive force of law

Hui Chia and Jeannie Paterson

Chapter 7 Data Brokers: Trading on Trust

Olivia Dixon

 

Part 3: A mechanics of corporate harms

Chapter 8 Evil Corporations in Horror Fiction

Penny Crofts

Chapter 9 Corporate Office, Corporate Irresponsibility and the Constitutive Vicariousness of Corporate Power

Timothy D Peters

Chapter 10 Blindness without a Will: The Dilemma of Corporate Collective Knowledge and Intention in Succession

Lisa Siraganian

Chapter 11 Corporate misuse of legal professional privilege: concealing and constituting crimes

Liz Campbell

 

Part 4: Future approaches

Chapter 12 The Monster Within: Representing Corporate Evil

Mihailis E. Diamantis

Chapter 13 Corporations as Haunted Entities: Conceptualising Responsibility for Historical Harm

Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk

Chapter 14 Corporate evil: a story of systems and silences

Elise Bant

Chapter 15 Redeeming Corporations: Designing legal interventions for complex adaptive systems

Rebecca Wallis and Simon Bronitt

Chapter 16 ‘Corporate Culture’ is The Problem, but Can it be Regulated?

Vicky Comino