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.

Some of the most decisive battles over the responsibilities of transnational corporations (TNCs) have been fought in domestic courtrooms – often far from where the alleged abuses occurred. The United States has hosted a substantial proportion of such cases against TNCs, supported by a legal framework that historically provided several plaintiff-friendly avenues. However, the landscape has become more challenging following the Supreme Court’s decisions in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. and Daimler AG v. Bauman. In Canada, the absence of an ATS-equivalent and the application of the doctrine of forum non conveniens have limited opportunities for litigation. However, recent decisions suggest more cases may flow to Canada in the future. In the United Kingdom, developments in the law relating to parent company liability have been particularly significant. In Across continental Europe, barriers such as limited access to class actions, prosecutorial discretion, and weak disclosure obligations continue to constrain transnational human rights litigation.

This chapter surveys the international legal framework governing transnational corporations (TNCs) and human rights. It begins with a brief history of the corporation, traces the rise of transnational corporate power since the 1970s, and offers a definition of the TNC. It then outlines the various ways in which corporate activities can adversely affect human rights, drawing on some of the most notorious incidents of recent decades. The chapter highlights the persistent difficulty of regulating corporations at the international level and describes the current regime under which states bear primary responsibility for preventing and remedying human rights abuses within their territories, including those committed by businesses. Since 2010, several states have introduced modern slavery legislation requiring companies to conduct due diligence on their operations and supply chains.