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.

Introduction Penny Crofts Part 1: Doomed to be Evil? 1 Can capitalism ever be other than evil? James Martel 2 Can a corporation be evil? Luke Russell 3 Corporate Vice Stephanie Collins Part 2: Corporate Harms 4 Ecocide, Evil and the Corporation Joanna Kyriakakis 5 Prescription Medicine, Adverse Effects and Economies of Death Marc Trabsky and Jacinthe Flore 6 The Corporate Evil of Unsafe Products: Strict liability, negligence and the expressive force of law Hui Chia and Jeannie Paterson 7 Data Brokers: Trading on Trust Olivia Dixon Part 3: A mechanics of corporate harms 8 Evil Corporations in Horror Fiction Penny Crofts 9 Corporate Office, Corporate Irresponsibility and the Constitutive Vicariousness of Corporate Power Timothy D Peters 10 Blindness without a Will: The Dilemma of Corporate Collective Knowledge and Intention in Succession Lisa Siraganian 11 Corporate misuse of legal professional privilege: concealing and constituting crimes Liz Campbell Part 4: Future approaches 12 The Monster Within: Representing Corporate Evil Mihailis E. Diamantis 13 Corporations as Haunted Entities: Conceptualising Responsibility for Historical Harm Penny Crofts and Honni van Rijswijk 14 Corporate evil: a story of systems and silences Elise Bant 15 Redeeming Corporations: Designing legal interventions for complex adaptive systems Rebecca Wallis and Simon Bronitt 16 ‘Corporate Culture’ is The Problem, but Can it be Regulated? Vicky Comino

Penny Crofts is Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.