Law – through regulation, criminalization and litigation – provides key mechanisms for mitigating the harmful effects of oil disasters. At the same time, these mechanisms also enable the perpetuation of oil disasters under an extractivist imperative. This disaster tolerance is the point of departure for this article's examination of the legal response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster over the last decade. Based on a methodology that combines a social harm approach with the political ecology of Felix Guattari, we firstly present a reconceptualization of harm inflicted by oil corporations across three registers: environment, society, and subjectivity. We subsequently introduce the concept of transversal harm, which allows us to move beyond the criminal and civil damage of corporate crime and negligence and to capture the collective and continuous impact of oil extractivism, as opposed to the exceptional impact of oil disasters. Transversal harm opens new avenues for assigning corporate responsibility and reducing disaster tolerance as the by-product of environmental law.

In conversation with several chapters of Stefan Grundmann’s, Hans Micklitz’s, and Moritz Renner’s book on New Private Law Theory, this paper reflects on contributions that theories of communication and constitutionalization can make to our understanding of the changing role of private law in a globalizing world. More abstract ideals are checked against an assessment of recent judgments of Dutch courts in cases regarding oil company Shell’s responsibility for environmental pollution in Nigeria. Such theoretical readings of case law, it is held, in the spirit of New Private Law Theory, show new directions that private law theories may choose in order to understand and strengthen the private-legal framework for societal questions of our times.

This article makes the case for a ‘holistic’ approach to human rights due diligence, arguing that such a standard must be interpreted in the light of mutually reinforcing principles of environmental law, climate law and human rights law. Through a review of emerging climate change-related litigation, it shows how a concept of ‘climate due diligence’ is gradually consolidating. Building on the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the article explores climate due diligence both as a standard of conduct and as a business process, presenting its main features. It argues that corporations should integrate climate due diligence into their processes and policies to be best prepared for likely regulatory and judicial developments, such as the upcoming European Union’s regulation on human rights and environmental due diligence.

The corporate responsibility to respect human rights was formally introduced in 2011 with the unanimous endorsement of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) by the UN Human Rights Council. It is grounded in social expectations and forms part of the companies' “social license to operate.” This paper argues that this responsibility is progressively turning into a legal duty for lead companies to respect human rights in those types of value chains which are characterized by a high level of control by a lead company over its business partners. Our argument rests on two recent legal developments. Firstly, the article analyzes the judicialization of the corporate responsibility to respect in the case law on parent company liability in various jurisdictions, which, we argue, is highly likely to have some implications in relation to certain types of value chains so as to trigger the liability of lead companies for the human rights harms arising out of the activities of entities over which they exercise sufficient control. Secondly, the article delves into the legislative developments which increasingly require lead companies to exercise due diligence so as to prevent and address adverse human rights impacts in their own activities and global value chains.

This article explores some aspects of the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision on Nevsun Resources v Araya in the light of its exposition on the act of state doctrine and application of core human rights as an integral aspect of international customary law and common law. It examines the Nevsun decision in the context of recent statutory developments in France and the Netherlands, the promised law reform in the European Union, and the proposed business and human rights treaty. I argue that it is high time to abandon the doctrinal fossil that human rights obligations do not apply to corporate governance and operations. It is hoped that COVID-19 contexts, and a post-pandemic world, will expeditiously result in the willing adoption of a treaty on business and human rights.

The exclusion of transnational human rights litigation from U.S. federal courts is, for most practical purposes, now complete. On April 24, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a 5–4 ruling in Jesner v. Arab Bank, deciding that foreign corporations cannot be sued under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS).

For a number of reasons, questions regarding the accountability of corporations for actions that might be complicit in the commission of international crimes have gained prominence in recent times. Though initiatives regarding what is more broadly described as business and human rights are to be welcomed, this sometimes distracts from existing systems of accountability, especially when those acts, which may be discussed as human rights violations, equally constitute crimes. Whilst not all criminal jurisdictions extend to legal persons, the Norwegian Penal Code does. This article analyses the Norwegian Penal Code's provisions, in light of amendments made to it in 2008 to include international crimes in it, with the effect of extending those crimes to corporations. The article first addresses the personal, material, temporal, and geographical scope of the penal code. It then addresses the potential consequence of the exercise of jurisdiction in light of the only case in recent times in Norway that deals explicitly with a corporation's potential criminal liability for war crimes. The article then addresses three additional issues with respect to provisions on complicity, intent, and defences under the Norwegian Penal Code, before concluding with some reflections on the possible future effects of this legislation and the possibility that it will inspire developments elsewhere.

This article examines the proposal that, in order to overcome the comparative law problem of diverse national positions in relation to corporate criminal liability, a scheme involving administrative or civil liability should be adopted if corporations are to be included in the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. It is argued that, despite the obvious practical appeal of such a solution, a criminal liability scheme should be preferred as perpetrators of international crimes – both natural and legal – should be subject to the full expressive and stigmatising capacities of the criminal law. However, recent international developments in corporate liability suggest a possible middle ground that may provide an acceptable solution to a majority of states.