Friday, July 16, 2021
Crofts on Corporate Criminal Law
Penny Crofts (University of Technology Sydney, Faculty of Law) has posted Aliens: Legal conceptions of the corporate invasion ((2021) Law & Literature) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
There has long been recognition that the criminal legal system has great difficulties in ascribing responsibility to corporations for harms caused and crimes committed. This article turns to the film Aliens (1986) to enrich the corporate criminal law imaginary. This articles argues that the film Aliens delivers a complex representation of the evil corporation Weyland Yutani and a depressing, realistic depiction of our (low or lack of) expectations of law and justice for corporations. The film portrays the dehumanising effects of the corporate form, an entity with legal personality but with almost no interest in humanity except as a means of labour and profit. Aliens depicts the routinization of harms, whereby the harms of Weyland Yutani are rendered banal and normal and not even categorised as criminal but just part of doing business. Despite holding up untrammelled rapacious inhuman exploitativeness for critique - no solution is proffered or even suggested. Aliens bleakly portrays the consequences of the legal failure of imagination in conceptualising and attributing corporate responsibility. If law continues to regard corporations as monstrous, incomprehensible and capable of great systemic harms, then law can and should import the insights of horror and use extreme measures to resolve the corporation. Alternatively, we can recognise corporations as a fiction of our own creation and change the story and genre of corporations away from horror, and rewrite the corporation.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/crimprof_blog/2021/07/crofts-on-corporate-criminal-law.html