Journal of Legal Anthropology

Responsibility and accountability in entangled global relations are negotiated across jurisdictional boundaries, localities and scales of legality. In this special issue, we trace struggles for corporate accountability from extraction sites in Ecuador, Colombia and Peru to an abandoned asbestos factory in Italy. We enquire into the gap between the legal institutions which govern attributions of responsibility in procedural, tort and corporate laws, lived experiences of harm connected to transnational business activities and moral expectations of responsibility in global relations. In the struggles for justice discussed in this special issue, we detect potential ways of rethinking ascriptions of responsibility to reflect the deep entanglements of our economies.

How does time structure the allocation of responsibility in the context of large-scale corporate crimes? Focusing on the Processo Eternit – a criminal case brought against the former main investor in Europe's largest asbestos-processing factory in Casale Monferrato (Italy) – this article compares the temporal order of the lived experience of the asbestos disaster in the affected community with the abstract time-reckoning of law. The everyday suffering in the form of the long-term health effects, inscribed in the body through the asbestos fibre, collides with the statute of limitation of the alleged crimes, as stipulated in law and endorsed in the court room. It examines how these incommensurable temporalities reconfigure the allocation of moral and legal responsibility for an industrial disaster and shows how these contradictions are related to the victims’ expectations of justice and their experience of injustice.

This article discusses the relation between proximity and temporality in the negotiation of corporate responsibilities in the Colombian coal mining sector. Corporate responsibility practices and discourses are oriented towards the future closures of coal mines and centred on self-reliance and independence of communities affected by the mining business. By invoking the future closures, the coal mines were temporalised in ways that turned the corporate responsibility into the personal and public responsibilities of the affected communities and the state. The article argues that the anticipation of the future closure served as a mode to cut proximity-based relations of corporate responsibility. Furthermore, it is suggested that the law has not (yet) sufficiently considered the relations between past corporate presences, lasting proximities, and corporate responsibility.

In recent years, various transnational corporations (TNCs) have faced legal proceedings in their home states for human rights violations and environmental damage committed abroad. These transnational lawsuits are an attempt to overcome corporate impunity and establish transnational chains of responsibility. At the same time, the individual legal cases are marked by procedural and legal hurdles and may entail the risk of social costs for claimants. In this article, I explore what such transnational lawsuits can contribute from the perspective of social movements in the Global South. Taking the Monterrico case from Peru as an example, I discuss the expectations of human rights lawyers in such cases and the relevant legal mechanisms. By focusing on out-of-court settlements, I argue that, from the perspective of the Global South actors involved in the case study, adjudication and the related judicial practices are fundamental to making the law effective.

Through the example of legal resistance to mining in Ecuador, this article explores the shift towards suing states rather than corporations. Key to ongoing resistance struggles is the allocation of preventive responsibility to ‘the state’ through the filing of constitutional lawsuits. I show how both the shift from the ‘politics of space’ to a ‘politics of time’ and a shift in the imaginary of the state contribute to claims of responsibility being increasingly directed at states. The article inquires into the effects of the temporal reversal from assessing past harm (and ruling retrospectively) to assessing the likelihood of future scenarios in order to prevent future harm. Finally, I address the limits of such allocation of responsibility, showing that while constitutional lawsuits are political attempts to challenge the government's economic programme and disrupt the logic of global capitalism, many powerful policy-shaping actors remain beyond the law's reach.

This special issue addresses the role of law in corporate accountability. Case studies reference people affected by asbestos in Italy, a coal company anticipating closure in Colombia, and both activists and human rights lawyers concerned with the impacts of mining in Ecuador. The afterword considers the significance of temporality in the law, including limits on retrospective claims and efforts to expand the prospective reach of both the law and state policy. It describes the perspectival character of the law in which the forum determines how the underlying facts are seen. It examines how responsibility, against a backdrop of distributed agency, is conceptualized by shortening or expanding chains of liability. It also points to the need for stronger connections between the anthropology of suffering and the discipline's ethical turn. Finally, it suggests that the legal claims discussed here are aspirational in the sense of describing how the world ought to be.

‘The business of business is business,’ Milton Friedman, a leading figure of the Chicago School of economic thought, famously declaimed. In his 1970 article, ‘The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits’, he argued that corporate managers who factor social and environmental considerations into their decision-making are, in effect, ‘imposing taxes … and deciding how the tax proceeds shall be spent’. By deviating from their organizational duties—maximizing profits for the companies that employ them—they are appropriating money owed to shareholders and allocating it to broader social causes, a function that resembles government. Friedman objects to this behavior not on economic or legal but on political grounds: managers have not been elected and there are no principled procedures for determining which causes to support beyond ‘general exhortations from on high’ (Friedman 1970: 17). He also expresses scepticism about ‘hypocritical window-dressing’, concluding: ‘our institutions, and the attitudes of the public make it in their self-interest to cloak their actions in this way’ (Friedman 1970: 17).

Ellen Hertz's manifold critique of corporate social responsibility (CSR) paradoxically begins by establishing common ground with the ardent defender of free market capitalism and an otherwise political opponent to her normative framework, Milton Friedman. Building on his analytical framework, according to which corporations and government operate on different principles, Hertz reinforces the idea that CSR cannot and should not replace democratic mechanisms in the determination of the public interest. In addition, following established critiques of CSR (e.g., Shamir 2008), Hertz highlights that CSR introduces the logics of the market in areas traditionally governed by different logics of action, while it also serves to obfuscate relations of power and to shape global governance in corporate-friendly directions.

In her article ‘Corporate Social Responsibility: The Great Shell Game’, Ellen Hertz suggests that there is an inherent danger of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to obscure the public/private divide. By means of strategically engaging with public interests, corporate CSR practices – that according to Hertz are practices deriving from the market – are able ‘to preempt and discredit attempts to define and carry out policies designed to protect the broader public interest’. CSR should be seen as ‘remediation at best’ that ideally needs to be replaced by ‘rules for business’ created by ‘the public’ and not those created by companies themselves.

Anna Beckers and Ioannis Kampourakis have formulated sophisticated critiques of ‘The Great Shell Game’, and I have learned a great deal from this exchange. Some of their criticism can be answered by clarifying the terms of the debate, which I do briefly below. I wish, however, to maintain the general thrust of my argument, and even to double down. With my title, I make an analogy between CSR and the confidence trick played by street operators who move pennies quickly between plastic cups and ask the assembled crowd to bet on where they end up. This game depends on skill but also on fraud, the operator working with a shill to mislead the audience. I suggest that as academics we must make sure that our sophistication does not place us in the role of the shill—preventing the public from noticing that corporations pocket the pennies.