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5 - Transnational Corporations and Environmental Politics

from Part II - Transnational Corporations, Corporate Law, and the Individual

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 October 2026

A. Claire Cutler
Affiliation:
University of Victoria, British Columbia
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Summary

This chapter focuses on three dimensions of corporate power, irresponsibility, and unaccountability, revealing how law functions to create special, protected spaces for corporations and capital. The first focus is on the corporate legal form as the personification of capital. The analysis reviews the history of the joint stock company and the legal developments that created a protected legal subjectivity for the business corporation under domestic laws. This special subjectivity shields principals from personal legal liability and corporations from legal responsibility for the environmental actions of their subsidiaries. The second dimension focuses on the significance of the investor-state regime in creating a similar, protected space for transnational capital. Functioning as Capital’s law, the investor-state dispute settlement system (ISDS) shields foreign corporations from accountability in national courts of law for their environmental conduct through bilateral and international investment agreements and a system of denationalized transnational arbitration. Various legal cases illustrate the barriers to legal accountability for environmental conduct under the ISDS. The third focus is on transnational value chains, where immanent critique of the contract form reveals the significance of law in expanding capital across jurisdictional boundaries and multiple politico-legal spaces, rendering corporate accountability for environmental conduct seemingly impossible to achieve.

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