OXFORD LPE#2: Can corporations be responsible? In conversation with Grietje Baars
*IMPORTANT NOTICE* This event will now happen ONLINE as the speaker can no longer make it in person. Please SIGN UP below to receive a Teams link via email.
About
In this seminar we will discuss the following questions: Can corporations be responsible? Can law be said to constrain corporations to account to society at large, or are corporate accountability mechamisms inherently limited? In what ways do these seemingly emancipatory discourses and practices that, on closer inspection, turn out to follow the logic of capitalism itself? In what ways can a historical-materialist approach to history shine light on the corporation as form of legal technology?
For our second session, we are joined by Dr. Grietje Baars to discuss their monograph, The Corporation, Law and Capitalism. In this work, Grietje offers a radical Marxist perspective on the role of law in the global political economy. Closing a major gap in historical-materialist scholarship, they demonstrate how the corporation, capitalism’s main engine from city-state and colonial times to the present multinational, is a masterpiece of legal technology. The symbiosis between law and capital becomes acutely apparent in the question of ‘corporate accountability’. Baars provides a detailed analysis of corporate human rights and war crimes trials, from the Nuremberg industrialists’ trials to current efforts. The book shows that precisely because of law’s relationship to capital, law cannot prevent or remedy the ‘externalities’ produced by corporate capitalism. This realisation will generate the space required to formulate a different answer to ‘the question of the corporation’, and to global corporate capitalism more broadly, outside of the law.
If you would like to attend, please register here.
Speaker – Grietje Baars
Grietje Baars is a Reader in Law and Social Change at City, University of London, where they work on the role of law in society, using queer and Marxist theory to understand (and ultimately subvert) the constitutive, ordering and ideological functions of law, and teach criminal law, queerly. Having worked on the political economy of international law, and law's gendering separately, in their latest project, Queering Corporate Power, they combine the two to discover how Queer theory (and practice) can help reverse the distributive effects of the corporate form, the 'motor of capitalism'.
Reading
While reading is not required to join the discussion, we encourage you to refer to the following resources:
– A primer, two minute read: Dr Margot E Salomon, 'Sustaining neoliberal capital through socio-economic rights', (Critical Legal Thinking 2017)
– A recommended, substantive article: Grietje Baars, '"It’s Not Me, It’s the Corporation": The Value of Corporate Accountability in the Global Political Economy' (2016) London Review of International Law.